In the secondhand market for gasoline-powered vehicles, there’s a certain amount of rationality based on decades of experience driving such vehicles. For a gas-powered car that has say fewer than 30k miles, buyers might pay 70% of the new vehicle price. For a gas-powered car that has say more than 100k miles, buyers might pay 20% of the new vehicle price. This is all based on the buyers’ expectations of remaining useful life of the vehicle, maintenance/repair costs, etc. The EV industry is still so new that, to most buyers, estimated remaining useful life of an EV, maintenance/repair costs, etc. seem like a total wildcard. Can you get a 100k miles on an EV battery? If you can’t, how much will it cost to replace the battery? Not a ton of people thinking about these questions
Your numbers are no longer accurate in the current used car market... Look up the values of used vehicles on one of the valuations sites and compare them to the cost of new vehicles. Most types of vehicles make it to more than 200,000 miles these days. My wife and I are still driving our 2001 Astrovan which has 225,000 miles and has never had any major work done.
You haven't gone used-car shopping lately, have you?
A 2018 model EV is more like a five year-old computer than a five year-old car — in that functional obsolescence plays a bigger role than physical deterioration in the loss of value. And anyone in the business world who used to donate old computers to schools will tell you that you can’t even give a five year-old computer away these days.