China’s used car dealers have set an expiry date for electric cars.
About four out of five used car dealers in China refuse to accept a fully electric vehicle older than five years, over worries about battery life and replacement costs, according to the International Energy Agency’s Global EV Outlook. A 3-year-old EV in China now resells for about 45% of its original price, down from almost 55% in 2023, according to the China Automobile Dealers Association.
China has been the world’s largest EV market for a decade and now has 44 million of them on its roads. This makes it the first country where EVs are aging in large numbers. Yet its dealers can’t reliably price a used EV, because there is no agreed way to measure the health of its most expensive part, the battery, according to industry experts. The countries that have imported Chinese EVs will face the same valuation problem as the cars turn five.
“Exporting the car is the easy part,” Bill Russo, founder of the Shanghai-based advisory firm Automobility, told Rest of World. “Building the ecosystem that supports its second and third owner is much harder.”
55% Share of Chinese EVs sold in countries outside Europe and the U.S.
Chinese carmakers exported more than 2.5 million EVs last year, twice the previous year’s total, the IEA reported. Europe was the largest market, followed by Southeast Asia. Chinese cars now make up 55% of EV sales in countries outside Europe and the U.S.
Buyers in the Gulf back away at the same five-year mark, as mileage climbs and the battery warranty winds down, Harsh Chaturvedi, an independent automotive consultant in the United Arab Emirates, told Rest of World.
“Customer interest drops significantly after the fifth year,” said Chaturvedi, who co-founded and ran the Indian electric fleet company MyEVPlus before selling his stake. “The fifth year therefore becomes an important psychological and commercial point in the used EV market.”
Used EVs for sale
Analysts, lenders, and leasing companies calculate how much a car loses at three and five years, the length of a typical lease and loan, Karl Brauer, executive analyst at U.S. car search firm iSeeCars, told Rest of World. EVs fall faster in those calculations because new buyers pay extra for the latest technology and for the statement the car makes about them — as much as they would for a luxury badge, he said.
“Used car shoppers are much more value-oriented,” Brauer said.
Battery warranties add to the concern, and explain why dealers turn older EVs away. Manufacturers typically cover the battery for eight years or 160,000 kilometres (99,419 miles), and a replacement can cost a third of a new car, Chaturvedi said. Every year of age eats into that warranty, and once it expires, the cost of a failed battery falls on the owner.
Abhimanyu Girotra, who bought a new Tesla Model Y in Dubai three years ago, has never run the battery health test built into his car — as any battery issue would be Tesla’s problem to fix.
“I have never felt that the battery has degraded dramatically,” Girotra told Rest of World. “Plus there is this Tesla warranty, so I know if anything happens I can take the car to them.”
Two vehicles of the same age and mileage can potentially have very different battery health.”Karl Brauer, executive analyst at U.S. car search firm iSeeCars
Checking a battery’s health is easy — any modern EV can report it through a standard diagnostic port, and third-party services now certify the result, Brauer said. Used car dealers rarely ask for those readings, and price still rests on age, mileage, remaining warranty, and model reputation, none of which shows the battery’s true condition, Chaturvedi said.
“Two vehicles of the same age and mileage can potentially have very different battery health depending on how they were driven and charged,” he said. “The market does not always have a simple way to reflect this difference in price.”
EV chargers and lifespan
China, having recognized the problem first, has started to respond. Buyers there have increasingly asked for inspection reports on batteries, motors, and electronics before committing to a used EV, Russo said. Dealerships are investing in equipment to run those tests.
How a car is driven and charged decides how long its battery lasts. An average EV loses just over 2% of its capacity every year, slow enough to leave most of the battery intact after a decade, fleet telematics firm Geotab found in its January study of 22,700 EVs. Cars that rely on high-power fast charging degrade at up to 3% a year, double the rate of slowly charged ones, and hot climates add to the toll, the study found.
The taxis from Indian carmaker Tata Motors in Chaturvedi’s fleet showed how quickly a battery can wear out. Driven up to 80,000 kilometres (49,709 miles) a year and fast-charged constantly, they lost up to 8% of their capacity annually and half their value within 12 months, yet the market would have no easy way to tell them apart from a carefully driven private car, he said.
“The biggest issue, in my view, is not simply whether an EV battery degrades,” Chaturvedi said. “It is that the used car market currently has limited visibility on the actual condition of that battery.”
When a used EV finally finds no buyer at all, its last value is what recyclers will pay for the metals inside — a few hundred dollars at most for the lithium-iron-phosphate batteries most Chinese EVs use, Frederick Bloomfield, senior analyst at Benchmark Mineral Intelligence, told Rest of World.
In Dubai, Girotra already knows what he will do when his Tesla’s warranty expires. He will run the battery test that day, and if the number disappoints, the car will go on the market, he said.
“Battery is everything for these cars,” Girotra said.
