> Electric cars are still affordable only to the affluent.
I just now ran a Carfax report and found no fewer than 7 electric Ford Focus cars within 50 miles of my zipcode for less than $15k used. Two of them are less than $10k. Not sure what "affluent" means to you.
Set the goalposts and we can discuss it. If we're talking new cars, I think >$30k is for the affluent. If you want to consider used cars, maybe they become more attainable, but the supply is tiny (literally 50x as many used IC focuses as used electric focuses near me) and there's still a premium for the equivalent car (~20% from what I see).
I can buy a 2013 electric Focus for $13k. I can buy a 2012 BMW 328i for $14k. Are BMWs also affordable now?
Older electric cars eventually need a complete battery pack replacement which is not a trivial cost. I don't know what the lifespan of the battery pack in a Focus is, though.
On an older focus that's not nearly the issue vs longer range electrics it's ~23 kWh * $150/kwh ~= 3,450$ and dropping.
I know people that spent that much just replacing a BMW's transmission. Yea, not free but everything else should be cheap so maintenance costs are likely to be far less over the next 5 - 10 years.
To be clear, I'm not actually advocating that used BMWs are affordable.
Edit: I do wonder how many of these "cheap" electric cars will ever have a replacement battery pack. When your car value drops below $5000, are you really going to spend $3000 (guesstimate including labor) to replace the battery?
Sure, I just meant if the TCO is around 1k/year higher on the BMW they are not really equivalent options for most people.
Anyway, this might change if they are more common, but for now used electrics seem to have a significant price premium suggesting people think replacing older battery packs is probably a good long term deal.
> used electrics seem to have a significant price premium suggesting people think replacing older battery packs is probably a good long term deal.
Maybe. Depends on how you interpret the numbers. The electric Focus seems to command a premium of ~20% over the SE for a comparable used car near me, but the MSRP is >50% over the SE new. So you could see that as used buyers believing that the electric is worth 20% more than the comparable used IC, or you could see that as buyers believing that the a value of an electric drops much more rapidly than the value of an IC. Maybe after a couple more years these lines cross and the IC commands a premium. I honestly don't know.
This is complicated by the dramatic drop in new batters.
If a new x kwh battery pack cost 10k then but a new xkwh battery pack is only 4k new today then predicted deprecation calculations should arguably be based on the 4k price not the 10k initial price unless you expect such dramatic price drops to continue.
In any case, I think the current used prices would be vastly lower if people expected the kind of range and lifetime limitations you get from not replacing the batteries.
I just now ran a Carfax report and found no fewer than 7 electric Ford Focus cars within 50 miles of my zipcode for less than $15k used. Two of them are less than $10k. Not sure what "affluent" means to you.