The inner sybarite

I was following a KIA EV6 this morning. It struck me that Dubya could buy 2 of those for the price of one iX.

You must have realised I was speaking in rough terms. About £30k for an EV6 and £60k for an iX was what I was thinking (second hand prices). It wasn't supposed to be a scientific paper, just an off the cuff rough comparison. I also wasn't suggesting you should do it.

I just thought it was an interesting way of putting into perspective how expensive I feel an iX is.

Just an IMHO.

I'd love one EV6 myself, wish I could afford/justify one.

If there is to be a recovery in used EV prices it is not going to be on cars consuming 24.85kWh/100kms or 2.5 miles/kWh or anything using more kWh/100kms or fewer miles/kWh - just using that as an example. Used car buyers tend, not always, to be on a budget anything over 20kWh/100kms or 3.1miles/kWh is not going to be on the budget minded motorists shopping list. 15kWh/100kms or 4.14 miles/kWh will be nearer the mark.

If you do not have access to a home charger and are dependent on public charging even at 50p/kWh that's almost an additional £5/62 miles in electricity between the cars. £20/week extra (assuming 12,000 miles/year or 250 miles/week) doesn't sound much though given people in full-time employment are struggling financially is the difference between a used car selling and not selling. Combined with the daft insurance premiums some companies are charging for EVs they're a tough sell to those who have not already jumped.

Because affordable. Because capable. Because remarkable value at today’s prices. Not perfect but better than an equivalent number of Discoveries.

The market is a mess at the moment for a variety of reasons, many of which have very little to do with the merits or otherwise of the vehicles themselves. I don’t propose to rehash them now but Covid and Ukraine, and more recently Israel in Gaza and Iran, have all done their bit to destabilise the world economy. People are putting off all kinds of expensive purchases, not just EVs. Politicians’ unwillingness to be the messenger with the news that fossil fuels HAVE to go, and really should have gone years ago, doesn’t help.

Depreciation is a bit like the way water cools. Any working car has a certain base value — ‘ambient value’, we might call it — and the higher above that it starts, the faster it falls towards ambient. So expensive cars — and yes, most EVs so far have been expensive — fall faster towards that ambient value but everything ends up the same. Call it entropy.

Factors like fashion and brand snobbery can vary the rate but the trajectory is always the same and because EVs are still relatively new, we haven’t seen many complete the downward curve, so we’re still seeing them in the steep part. The economy will eventually settle down — economies usually do — and the political distortions will gradually disappear — or go into reverse — as the deadlines loom. As with houses and other commodities subject to market fluctuations, what you buy matters less than when you buy it.

Similarly with public charging, the market is a Wild West at the moment, with operators doing their own thing and desperate to makes themselves distinctive when they really have nothing distinctive to sell, investing hugely and trying to recoup in time to satisfy their investors. You could make a good case, as with water suppliers, for simply nationalising them all and regarding affordable, accessible charging as a public good that would accelerate the move to a clean economy, but you can imagine what this government’s masters would make of that. A more realistic hope is that charging will simply settle down into an unglamorous business model with secure revenues but low margins. We’re some way from that at the moment.

I understand what you are saying and I get to use my German word of the moment, jein.

I agree every car ends up at a base value and you'd expect the cars with better quality to have a longer life which would slow the depreciation between new price and base price. If that were true then Volvo would be up there with the cheapest of leases having an average long life but they aren't and they don't. Something else is propping up some vehicles over others even within an individual manufacturers range of vehicles available.

Traditionally, the German manufacturers have, within each models price band, started pretty high and enjoyed slow depreciation giving favourable lease rates. The market has changed and for some particular models what we have known has been tipped on its head.

Edit: combine that with Norm's interest rate prediction, which a few of us have mentioned, and the general state of things, to summarise the political, religious and war mongers, and there's nowhere for these vehicles to go after three years. People aren't spending what they haven't got and a good many are hanging on to what they do have.