Used EV price gains are concentrated below $40,000

Cars lose money. It is the nearest thing the motor trade has to a law of physics, and Andrew Garberson, head of growth and research at Recurrent, put it to CNBC in exactly those terms: "That's just the law of used cars." Electric cars were supposed to be the extreme case, the segment with what Edmunds insights director Ivan Drury called "horrendous" resale values. This year the used EV market stopped cooperating.

Recurrent compared the same makes and model years across 108 combinations with usable sample sizes and found prices up 5.1% on a volume-weighted basis between January and June, and up roughly 7% through mid-July. Cox Automotive's Stephanie Valdez Streaty told CNBC that 21 of the 25 highest-volume used EV models rose over the same window. Edmunds, running numbers exclusively for the network, put the average transaction price of a three-year-old EV up 6% in the first half, from $31,429 to $33,303. Manheim's wholesale index had it first: as of mid-May the electric segment was up 11.4% year over year, leading every other major category.

Read the Recurrent breakdown by price band and the headline dissolves into something more useful. Vehicles listed under $20,000 in January appreciated 9.4%. The $30,000–$40,000 band rose 6.5%, the $20,000–$30,000 band 5.6%. Above that line the direction flips: $40,000–$55,000 fell 1.2%, and anything above $55,000 dropped 3.3%.

Individual cars show the same shape. A 2023 Chevrolet Bolt EV went from $17,718 to $21,204, a 19.7% gain. A 2022 Tesla Model 3 rose 13.2% to $26,884, a 2023 Mustang Mach-E 13.0% to $34,733, a 2021 Volkswagen ID.4 12.6% to $21,128. The appreciation is not happening to electric cars generally. It is happening to cheap ones.

The Electric Viking, reviewing the Recurrent figures for his audience, treated the numbers as a rebuttal to years of depreciation-disaster coverage, while conceding the same split: affordable EVs flat or climbing, expensive ones still sliding. That caveat matters more than the vindication. If you own a $60,000 electric SUV, none of this is about you.

Three things arrived at once. Demand that cratered after federal EV credits expired at the end of September 2025 has been climbing back for seven straight months. Petrol crossed a $4.00 national average this spring after the conflict with Iran unsettled oil markets. And a wave of 2023–2025 lease originations is returning to dealer lots, mostly not bought out by the original lessees.

Recurrent is careful about the fuel-price explanation, noting that its study of 15 years of gas spikes found most did not move EV sales quickly. What spikes reliably do, in data going back to the 1970s, is push buyers out of the new market and into the used one. That is the mechanism worth watching.

The residual story underneath is more interesting than the price story. On Recurrent's EV Insider podcast, J.D. Power senior vice president of data and analytics Tyson Jominy explained that residual values are written roughly three years before a car returns to market, and the values set for those EVs turned out to be far below what the market would eventually pay. Lenders wanted the cars off their books; buyers got the bargains. J.D. Power's ALG arm has since built Recurrent's battery-retention forecasts into its modelling, which Jominy said has been in market under a year. The cars priced with that data do not come back until roughly 2029.

Autotrader's July Retail Price Index recorded like-for-like used EV prices up 3.3% year on year to £24,946, the strongest annual growth it has logged for electric cars, following 0.0% in May and 1.6% in June. Three-to-five-year-old EVs were up 10.2%. Electric cars sold in 25 days against 30 for petrol.

YouTube critic Barrie Crampton went through the same release and found the parts the headline skips, and his reading holds up against the document. Overall market health fell 7% year on year. Ten-to-fifteen-year-old cars of every fuel type rose 7.0%, more than double the EV figure that led the announcement. And every single entry on Autotrader's own top-ten price contraction table is electric, from the Audi A6 e-tron Avant and Subaru Solterra at minus 18.8% down through the Polestar 3, Ford Capri and Lotus Eletre to the MG MGS5 at minus 28.7% and the BMW i5 at minus 28.8%.

For sellers, Drury's advice to CNBC was blunt: "If you own one right now and you're debating selling, this matters to you a lot. If your ownership cycle is coming to an end with this vehicle, price-shop this thing."

Buyers face the harder position. In CarEdge's summer market update, Ray and Zach Shefska put used EV prices up nearly 14% year on year and warned of a widening gap between electric, hybrid and combustion pricing, in a used market already carrying its lowest inventory in five years and an average listing near $27,000. Their suggestion is to price the new car alongside the used one, since manufacturers are still running 0% APR on electric stock and the warranty comes with it. They also pointed out that sub-$15,000 cars are now the hardest thing in the market to find, average used mileage sits above 70,000, and a pre-purchase inspection is not optional.

The sentence "used EV prices are rising" is not, at this point, a fact about your car. It is a fact about a price band, and about a supply squeeze at the bottom of it that a few hundred thousand returning lease cars could close.