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There are some rules about buying a used car that have become almost instinctive. Mileage is one of them.
See 60,000, 70,000 or 80,000 miles on the clock and many buyers immediately start thinking about what might go wrong next. That instinct has been built over decades of buying petrol and diesel cars and can be a handy shortcut to refine a list of options.
New research commissioned by the BVRLA shows that the latest generation of vehicles might need to be judged on a fresh set of parameters.
Analysis by New AutoMotive of 47.4 million MOT tests found relatively little difference between electric and petrol cars at lower mileages, once vehicle age and mileage were taken into account. Beyond around 60,000 miles, however, the picture changes.
The MOT failure rate for electric cars levels off at approximately 16%, while the equivalent rate for petrol and diesel cars continues to rise. Among three-to-eight-year-old cars that had covered 90,000-120,000 miles, EVs were around 25% less likely to fail their MOT than equivalent petrol cars. Above 120,000 miles, 16.0% of EVs failed compared with 23.5% of petrol cars.
While fears over long-term durability remain, those numbers should give buyers a great deal of reassurance.
Many of the electric cars entering the used market today have spent their first three or four years in company and leasing fleets. They have often covered substantial mileages and, importantly, they are giving us a much stronger evidence base about how EVs perform as they get older.
The findings are particularly relevant during #UsedEVweek. One of the aims of this week is to challenge outdated perceptions where the evidence allows us to do so.
That does not mean pretending EVs are better at everything or should be the first choice for every use case.
Indeed, the research found more tyre defects among electric cars, for example, although it found no evidence of the often-discussed weight penalty translating into greater suspension problems. It also found older EVs continuing to return for MOTs at a higher rate than petrol cars and recording higher median annual mileage at every age examined between four and 16 years.
There is an important limitation too. An MOT tells us about roadworthiness; it does not tell us about battery state of health, degradation or charging performance. Better access to trusted battery health information remains an important part of giving used EV buyers confidence.
Nobody should buy an 80,000-mile EV simply because of this research. Buyers still need to look at its history, condition, tyres and battery health, just as they would scrutinise the engine, gearbox and service history of an ICE vehicle.
What we can start to challenge is the assumption that 80,000 or 100,000 miles automatically means an electric car is approaching the end of its useful life. The evidence does not support that.
Used EVs are where the transition starts becoming accessible to a much broader group of motorists. A three or four-year-old vehicle can offer a considerable saving against its original price while still having plenty of useful life ahead of it. Giving customers confidence in those cars supports demand, residual values and, ultimately, the economics of putting new EVs onto fleets.
A healthy used market underpins a healthy new one.
We have seen encouraging signs from the used EV market in recent months. #UsedEVweek is an opportunity for all of us across the sector to build on them, using evidence rather than old assumptions to tell a better-informed story about the vehicles now reaching their second owners.
Sometimes the rules we have relied on for decades simply need rewriting.
