'What I wish I knew before buying a second-hand EV'

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Electric vehicles are fast becoming a permanent fixture in Australia’s car market, increasing in popularity tenfold over the past decade.

But, with used EV prices becoming a lot more competitive, is it worth buying a second-hand electric car now?

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Australia lagged behind Europe and Asia in the number of EV models on offer until 2021–2022. Thus, it has taken a few years for our used market to flourish with choice.

Now that the first-generation EV models, such as the Nissan Leaf, Tesla Model S, Mitsubishi i-MiEV, and BMW i3, are beginning to age, they’re becoming more affordable to a wider range of buyers.

Not only are the first-generation EVs starting to get cheaper, but the current-generation second-hand electric cars are starting to hit the used market, too, as people begin to access new options and sell their three- or four-year-old cars.

We’ve spoken to motorists who have purchased a second-hand electric car to find out what their experiences have been.

Bryce Gaton – 2011 Mitsubishi i-MiEV, 45,000km

I bought the i-MiEV three years ago as a temporary runaround, but loved it so much I still have it as a second/’around town’ vehicle. It is actually my fifth EV; I have been working with/on and driving electric cars since 2008.

The company that owned [the i-MiEV] was going out of business, and the car looked rather sad, sitting there looking at me. Its sad, cloudy headlamps said: ‘Take me home! Please rescue me’.

I needed a runaround and always wanted an i-MiEV, so I bought it for $6000 and spent around $1500 getting it roadworthy.

After buying it, a number of items were needed to make it roadworthy again – a new 12V battery, fixing/replacing some lights, new tyres which were cracked from age but not worn out, and new front brake pads and rotors.

Since then, the only maintenance has been a free safety recall to replace a brake booster component. It will need a brake fluid and coolant change soon, but that’s about it.

The i-MiEV replaced a [electric] converted Citroen Berlingo as my knock-around/spare car, but I also have a Hyundai Kona Electric, which I bought new in mid-2019, and I still keep one ‘fossil’: a Renault Clio Sport Cup.

I use it as a personal example of how batteries don’t die the day after the warranty runs out. I do a lot of public speaking on the topic of EVs, so it is a useful car to point to for a real-life example of it being from the first year of manufacture of modern-day production BEVs but still running on the original battery.

It’s very much a TARDIS – it looks like a jelly bean from the outside, the sort of thing only a mother could love, but inside, it’s just like a normal car. If you fold down the back seats, you can almost get more in there than in my Hyundai Kona.

I’ve done somewhere around 7000–10,000km in three years. Being a run-around car, you don’t do a lot of kilometres doing short trips around town.

It’s held up quite well. It’s not as quick as some of the later ones, but it was certainly quick compared to petrol cars of the same era. Its size makes it very easy to park, it has a tight turning circle, and it has all the things modern EVs have, such as regenerative braking.

[My least favourite thing] is remembering to charge it at the end of every day of use. I have got so used to current-day EVs that only need to be charged once every 2–3 weeks that it feels like a chore to plug it in each night.

And it has the old DC charge plug – EVs long ago standardised on the CCS plug system. There is almost nowhere left where I can do a DC charge anymore. The CHAdeMO charging lead availability disappeared even faster than I expected.

If I were to replace it, I would buy a Renault 5 E-tech. It has three-phase AC charging, the standard AC/DC charging plug, V2G, and a light tow rating. The Renault has also had rave reviews regarding its handling, drivability, and practicality. Provided Renault follows through on its intentions to bring it here, it would replace both the iMiEV and Kona.

On second thought, maybe I should keep the iMiEV, and the R5 should replace the Kona and Clio Cup.

John Konstantakopoulos – 2015 Tesla Model S 85D, 250,000km

I paid $50,000 for my used 2015 Tesla Model S 85D, fully maxed-out, which included a premium sound system, snow package, free supercharging and free internet for life.  

[My favourite things about it are] the sounds, the speed, the sleek looks, the excellent mobile phone integration, and the handling on the road.

I was a little worried about the battery, but [the previous owner] said he hadn’t been having any issues, and he was only charging it to 80 per cent for his journeys. I haven’t looked into a replacement battery, but I’ve heard that it has been coming down in price.

Since then, I have checked it with the Tessie app, and it looks like the battery is tracking pretty well. I charge it at night off-peak between 12am and 6am, and I get a full charge by the morning, no matter how low the charge is.

The vehicle advertises that it can do around 340km at a 100 per cent charge. I’d be pretty comfortable with this vehicle doing 300km on a 100 per cent charge.

This vehicle does not have full self-driving, but the self-driving it does have is still very useful for long trips. However, you still have to pay attention to the roads, which is pretty much like cruise control with some additional steering functionality. 

I got a roadworthy done, and they had to replace the front ball joints. Apparently, this is pretty common for these heavy cars. But I’m hoping Tesla overengineered the replacements, so I shouldn’t have to do that again.

Getting it registered with VicRoads was pretty straightforward, although we spent a lot of time trying to find the VIN number engraved on the vehicle chassis.

My driver’s side handle failed recently, but it was easily fixed. One tyre blew out because the previous owner had cheap tyres installed on the vehicle, but ever since I replaced them, they’ve been fine. The service Tesla offered to get me a wheel so that I can move again was pretty responsive.

I wouldn’t look to replace it currently as I am very happy with it, but potentially, in the future, I’d look at a newer Model S P90D. 

Mike Polljonker – 2024 Kia EV6 GT Track car

My business, Dkubus, specialises in suspension and fuel injection for classic Mercedes-Benz vehicles. But I’m a massive nerd when it comes to technology and improving classic cars, which led me down the garden path towards the electrical technology sector.  

Over the past year, I bought a couple of smashed second-hand electric cars: some MGs, a few Kia EV6-GTs, and a Volvo C40 at auction. Every vehicle we have purchased has not worked after arriving here. The impact seemed to cut into the 12-volt wiring, meaning I had to reroute the wiring.

It seems like manufacturers now put cables in places that almost guarantee the car won’t work after a crash. I’m not calling any specific manufacturers out because they’ve all been put together with a similar amount of thoughtlessness, and that’s not directly EV-related either. All cars are built that way now.

The idea originally was to build a hill-climb car, but at this stage, it’s been quite difficult because tracks treat EVs like hazardous bombs. But I’ve been around motorsport events for a long time, and petrol cars regularly catch on fire because spillages of flammable fuels onto hot surfaces cause immediate flame-ups, but they are relatively quick and easy to handle.

But a battery fire is not something that Motorsport Australia deems extinguishable. It doesn’t seem to yet recognise the lack of possibility of that fire actually starting; batteries don’t just spontaneously combust. A lot of cars have had big monster crashes, and I bought a few of them, and not one of them has been burnt.

We bought the EV6 because, in 2022, Motorsport Australia brought out regulations that said that you could only compete with an electric vehicle if it was an OEM, but you could not compete with a custom-built electric vehicle for racing, which, of course, is what we were working on.

The rules came out in such a way that it was a case-by-case application basis to get a vehicle like that approved for motorsport, and that’s never a recipe for success, so it just got shelved until the rules officially came out.

However, the performance of the EV6 has been astounding; we lightened it quite a bit due to the lack of passenger requirements, so we don’t need passenger seats and all the other things. We put smaller-diameter tyres and wheels on the car to give it a better overall ratio drive, now the car can accelerate blisteringly quick.

I suppose in comparison to the petrol cars, one of the things that I didn’t necessarily think would be an advantage is the lack of combustion noises. Without them, it means that I can hear the chassis and I can hear the tyre contact patch.

If you’re an analytical driver, you can start to determine at what point the vehicle is going to start to break traction, and you can drive a lot more accurately. You can get more out of the contact of the tyre, so finding the limits is somewhat easier.

It defies its weight. You wouldn’t necessarily know how heavy it is unless you’re at the limit of traction when it comes to heavy braking. When you take off, you’ve got a reasonable amount of weight. You can put a lot more load into the tyre because you’ve got that grip pushing down; it’s like having downforce from an aero device.

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