If you?re planning to buy a new electric car, you?d better be prepared for some sticker shock?not when you buy the car, but when you sell it.
Electric cars are more efficient than gasoline or diesel vehicles, and they save serious money?a few hundred to a few thousand dollars a year, depending on the vehicle type?using electricity from the grid versus fuel from the gas station. They cost less to maintain and repair, too. But all that money saved?even including the $7500 federal EV tax credit that will sweeten your first year?won?t counter the worst thing to befall most EVs: horrendous depreciation.
Electric vehicles lose more than $5700 per year, on average, over the first five years. That’s about $28,500 off their original price compared to an average of less than $3200 a year or $16,000 over five years across all vehicle types. In this year?s edition of its Your Driving Costs study examining the true cost of vehicle ownership, the American Automobile Association (AAA) separated out hybrids and electric vehicles (EVs) for the first time, and the electric-vehicle results were a noteworthy finding. While hybrids and EVs both came back with lower than average operating costs, the high depreciation made EVs cost more than hybrids over the five-year/15,000-mile-per-year projections of the study.
AAA uses a proprietary formula to calculate total operating costs per mile and then combines that with per-day/yearly ownership costs to arrive at total driving costs. The opera...