A cheap used EV can still bring an expensive insurance quote

A used EV can look cheap on the windscreen and expensive on the insurance screen. The two prices move for different reasons: depreciation sets the first, while crash repair bills, parts support and write-off rates weigh heavily on the second.

Insurify, which analysed more than 235 million quotes for a report published in June 2026, put the average annual cost of insuring an EV in the United States at $3,159, nearly $1,000 more than a petrol car. Across its quote data, the average EV premium was 42% higher. The trend underneath matters more: the gap ran at 29% in 2023, widened to 49% in 2025, and has eased slightly this year. Economic analyst Julia Taliesin told Grist that "insurers were charging those higher premiums to balance their risks" while claims data was thin.

The most useful figure in the Insurify data for a second-hand buyer: EVs from the past two model years carry only an 18% premium gap. The 42% average is dragged upward by older cars — precisely the stock the used market is made of. Buy the depreciation and you buy the actuarial history that came with it.

Geography swings it further. Washington, D.C. drivers face $6,394 a year for an EV against $4,124 for a petrol car, Rhode Island shows the widest spread at 73%, and Maine is the cheapest place to insure an EV at $1,476. Ryan Mandell of Mitchell, which processes collision repair estimates, puts the underlying repair-cost delta at around 15%, with the Ford F-150 Lightning about 30% above its petrol sibling. BloombergNEF's Aleksandra O'Donovan has pointed out that a Tesla Model Y costs close to three times as much to insure in the US as the same car does in Germany, which suggests the American number is about market structure rather than physics.

Canadian figures show what insurers are actually reacting to. Sussex International, working from twelve months of premiums and claims, found EV drivers paying $3,131 a year against $2,289 for petrol — a 36.8% gap, against roughly 13% in the UK and about 10% in Australia. Collision repairs averaged $6,534 per EV claim in 2024 versus $4,958 for combustion cars. The total-loss rate for EVs climbed from 5.9% in 2023 to 8.7% in 2024, while the combustion average sat near 4.5%.

Chris of the Australian channel Outcast EV went looking for the mechanism after conversations with repairers he knows. His account is that independent smash repairers increasingly decline EV work because parts for some newer brands are unobtainable in useful timeframes — he describes a lightly damaged car under five years old sitting off the road for more than six months waiting on a replacement headlight. Repairers do not want half-finished cars occupying a bay. In his account, that reluctance and the parts delay can leave an insurer choosing a write-off instead of a repair.

He then priced 2025-model EVs between roughly A$60,000 and A$80,000 on a comparison site with every other variable held constant, and got quotes from about A$1,300 to over A$5,000 for cars in the same class. Brands with deep dealer and parts networks — he cites MG and his own Hyundai Ioniq 5 — came in cheapest, with the Ioniq 5 undercutting a top-spec Toyota Camry despite costing considerably more to buy. He notes Tesla lists four authorised collision repairers for the whole of Australia, and describes a 2023 Model Y with 30,000km, drivable, no airbags deployed and damage confined to a door and a front guard, selling at salvage auction for around A$4,000 as a statutory write-off against a retail value he estimates at A$45,000 to A$55,000. He flags the repairer accounts as second-hand, and his conclusion is about make and model rather than EVs as a category.

The gap is real but it is not fixed, and it responds to shopping. Elevate Motor Co pulled eight like-for-like quotes across four EV and petrol pairs on one driver profile in Virginia, and found the Tesla Model 3 costing 23% more than a BMW 330i, the Model Y 41% more than an X3 and the Mach-E 28% more than a Ford Edge — an average of about $34 a month, closer to $50 for the Teslas, or roughly $400 to $600 a year. Running the same Model 3 through an aggregator instead of a single insurer dropped the monthly figure from $216 to $148, a difference of more than $800 a year for a few minutes of work.

Their host also documents a trap with usage-based cover. Tesla Insurance quoted him $89 a month, drifted to $100 as the safety score docked him for aggressive turns and late-night driving, then jumped past $233 after one round trip from Virginia to New York made the system extrapolate an annual mileage above 24,000. He could not find a way to correct the estimate in the app and went back to a conventional insurer at about $110.

The rest of the ownership ledger still points the other way. A CarMax and Edmunds survey of more than 50 owners found four in five spending less on charging than on the fuel they replaced. The same video cites Consumer Reports for maintenance and repair costs at nearly half those of a petrol car. The same survey flagged the offsets: tyres at roughly $1,000 a set because the cars are heavier, and annual EV registration surcharges of $50 to $200 in states recouping lost fuel tax. Policygenius, comparing 24 popular models, found EVs averaging $44 a month more to insure, with the Model Y alone costing $100 a month more than a Honda CR-V.

None of that argues against buying a used EV. It argues for getting the insurance quote before the test drive rather than after the paperwork, and for treating a brand's parts and collision-repair network as part of the specification. On a cheap used car, an unrepairable door is the expensive option.