It's a brutal time to sell and a helluva time to buy. The used EV market is in freefall, and it's current owners that are holding the bag. But if you've been looking for the time to get into a modern, long-range EV, it may be now.
New data from Edmunds shows that EV values have fallen 20.5% year over year. That's a seismic shift. The overall used car market, for reference, has cooled by 6.8% over the same time period. That's a big swing for the market as a whole, but the EV swing is gargantuan. Compared to average used vehicle values during the second quarter of 2022, EV values in Q2 2024 are down a whopping 38.5%.
They are worthless. You can't own them because of all the criminal proprietary crap. The cars are unserviceable. You don't see anything newer popping up at general used car lots because the junk is simply untenable. No one can fix them. There is no second hand market in this neo feudal digital dystopia. Buying proprietary crap like this has consequences; it means you don't actually own anything; it means you can't offload it. You paid all that money to burn every penny all by yourself. Trading it in is a monopolistic dream land where you're forced to sell it back to the true owner for peanuts, bent over, and take it again for a bigger gouge. You've sold autonomy, ownership, citizenship, and ultimately democracy, and you paid for the privilege... to subscribe to the scam of a highway robber. Your only vote is in the purchase. You can only fix yourself, not everyone else, but you alone in the paradigm are either part of the problem or part of the solution.
Not really on a deeper level. The systems underpinning all present vehicles are all proprietary garbage. It has been that way since around 2013 when cars started having modems and acting as data mining stalkerware that steals your digital person for manipulation and exploitation.
There were already many schemes present where digital theft was already an issue, but after the acceptance of stalkerware as standard, you've completely lost true ownership of any vehicle. The worst offenders are ALL electric vehicles, but any vehicle in the last 10 years is completely worthless second hand. This shift made the poor of society far more impoverished in the long term and creates a massive barrier in wealth disparity that will become far clearer to see in the next 10 years.
I painted cars for these kinds of general used car lots in the aughties. I even dabbled in buying for dealers at wholesale auctions. I can see the market clearly when I see what these kinds of dealers carry right now. It clearly looks like the world is sinking into something like the Cuban embargo where dealers are doing anything they can to acquire and resell the last age of ownable models that can be found at dying auction houses. It is the end of ownership. That means the end of autonomy. This is not just an EV problem, but it is an E problem. And it absolutely is a soft coup against democracy.
People lack an objective understanding of how the used car market works, the margins, repairs, etc. I'll block the community fanboy club now so that I don't intrude with any perspective reality. What I am saying will be clearly seen in due time. I don't like it, but this is reality.
While not the best news, most car models from before 2018 that are connected only have 3g modems (and no 2g/1g fallbacks to save money), 3G has essentially been off in North America for a few years so most of the connected cars from that era can not connect to anything (at least not without new modems/adapters).
Although this ofc says nothing of facts like Mercedes charging $50+ a day to use their diagnostics/repair software thats required for just about anything from 2010+ and has many functions locked to their tools that cost a few thousand each.MB diagnostics price list
I'm on their side of the argument, especially if they are broadening the complaint to cover all cars. They are all collecting shocking amounts of data. The touchscreen consoles are certainly not FOSS, who knows how long those will be maintained or if they can be replaced with something that isn't garbage.
I was in a rental car (ICE) on a trip recently that decided to update its own software without driver consent during a gas station stop. First of all, why is it connected to the internet to be able to receive new software?