Depreciation rates for electric vehicles are worse, you say? That’s the understatement of the decade—the mother of all understatements, if we’re being precise. The used-EV market doesn’t decline; it disintegrates. The resale value doesn’t slope down gently—it leaps straight off a cliff and doesn’t even bother screaming on the way down.
I’ve seen $60,000 “eco-marvels” being offered for $12,000 after just three years. Not Teslas, mind you—those at least manage to die a little more gracefully—but the lesser brands: the Kias, the Hyundais, the shiny showroom promises that age like milk in summer. Even the Teslas, for all their Silicon Valley glamour, bleed value faster than their owners can virtue-signal.
Now add a few more ingredients to this fine economic stew: subsidies fading away, tax perks evaporating, the “special lanes” and privileges being quietly revoked, and maintenance costs soaring because physics doesn’t care about marketing. Heavy cars chew through tires, brakes, and bearings like there’s no tomorrow—and for some of them, maybe there isn’t.
And we’re not even done. People are slowly waking up to the fact that these vehicles can turn into rolling incendiary devices. The moment one battery decides it’s had enough, you don’t have a car—you have a 1,000°C chemical tantrum. In Vienna alone, several underground parking garages have already banned EVs entirely. Too risky. Too unpredictable. Too flammable.So yes, the EV dream is fading, and fast. Soon they’ll return to their rightful place—oddities on the street, relics of a hysterical decade when humanity mistook political fashion for progress. The great leap forward turned out to be a nosedive.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/10/20/ev-value-price-gas-cars.html