301 The Second-Hand Car Purchase Episode

Gary Comerford (: 00:05

I don't know whether you saw, but earlier this year.

I don't know whether you saw but earlier this year at the

Gary Comerford (: 00:26

I don't know whether you saw, but earlier on this year Auto Trader announced that the average price of a new EV was cheaper than the average price of a new ice car. That's a pretty cool tipping point for EVs. But it's only for brand new vehicles. But let's focus today on second hand vehicles. How the price is doing relative to second hand ice? And what do you need to look at when buying second hand? I mean you don't want to buy a clunker, right?

Gary Comerford (: 01:09

Hi I'm Gary and this is Epis Episode Hi. Hi, I'm Gary and this is episode three hundred and one of EV Musings, a podcast about renewables of electric vehicles and things that are interesting to electric vehicle owners. And welcome to season sixteen of the podcast, episodes three hundred one to three hundred and twenty.

Gary Comerford (: 01:34

Over the next twenty weeks we'll be continuing to look at things that important in the EV and renewable space. We'll be looking at BYD slash charging tech, the future of battery chemistry, the real life experience of living without a home charger. I'll be chatting with the CPO Eon Drive, and hopefully we'll get Ozev on the show. But before all that, let's look at second hand EVs.

Gary Comerford (: 02:01

The Auto Trader announcement that the average price of a new electric vehicle was cheaper than the average price of a new and turbine combustion engine car was something quite special. We've been looking for price parity for a while. It now seems to be here. Now, yes, if you compare the cheapest fossil fuel BMW to the cheapest EV BMW, there are differences. But as I've said before on this podcast, if you're comparing a base spec ice and a base spec EV, you're not comparing like with like. At the time of writing, the cheapest Ford on the market with an equivalent EV.

is the Ford Puma. The base model Puma Gen E is just under £30,000. The base model Ford Puma Ice is just over £27,000. But the Puma model that's closer in performance inspect to the Gen E costs £34,000. So that's the difference. But we're not here to talk about new cars. 90% of all car sales in the UK are in the secondhand market. And today we're looking at what you need to do to buy a secondhand EV. Now before I go any further,

Can I ask you to make sure that if this is your first time here, why not click the subscribe button? And if you're watching on YouTube, click the little bell icon and maybe add a like. It'll help the dreaded algorithm show my stuff to more and more people. Thank you.

Gary Comerford (: 03:11

Now, if you ask anyone who's never driven an EV why they wouldn't buy a second hand one, they'll invariably give you the answer you don't know what state the battery's in.

This comes back to something we discussed in the battery percentage episode last season, where we talked about how battery wear is related to how the car is stored and charged. But a lot of this is just window dressing to the fact that people who don't have EVs tend to think that the batteries degrade in the same way as the ones in your phone do. Now that's absolutely not the case, and we've talked about this in several previous episodes. But if you're buying a car that has got some mileage on it,

You'll want to know how that has affected the battery, which is where battery certificates come in. And we'll come back to those in a short while. When buying your secondhand EV, there's a couple of options that you can take. You can buy from a main dealer, you can buy online, and you can buy privately. Each of these has advantages and disadvantages. When I got my Pulestar 2 last year,

I bought it online via a company called Car360. I'll come back to Car360 in a minute, but let's start by looking at buying from a dealer. The dealership experience has its benefits. They understand cars. Generally, they understand the customer need. They can prep the car, survey it, and do the checks that are needed. And if you want peace of mind, a dealership sale is probably the right thing for you. But there are a couple of caveats for dealers. If you're buying your EV second hand from a dealer,

Where it was traded in against a new car, there's no guarantee the dealer has any idea about the vehicle itself. Let's assume you're looking for a second-hand Ford Gen E Puma and you find one for sale at a Honda dealership. It's possible this Gen E was part exchange in for a Honda CRV or a Civic. Neither of these are full electric cars. And indeed, Honda do not sell an electric car in the UK at the time of recording. Although they are registering interest for a new Honda Super N, a Korean K car box.

Gary Comerford (: 05:13

On re a Korean K car box on wheels. So the dealer may not know anything about electric cars, and the dealership may not have any knowledge on prepping them for sale. So if you're going to buy from a dealer, at least buy from a dealer who has a good range of electric cars in there already. Make sure the dealer knows what he's talking about, and we've covered this in the test drive episode. Link on the screen. And we've talked about making sure that the dealer understands things like kilowatt hours for battery size and that they drive electric themselves.

Then ask them for a battery check. Cover battery checks below, stick with me.

If you're happy with the car, have done a battery check, an HPI check to make sure there's no insurance issues with it, and you're comfortable with the financing, then by all means buy it. So let's have a quick look at private sales. The private sale is something of a dark, foreboding forest. You have little visibility of the car itself. You generally can't do anything like a full review of the car before you buy it. You have no idea whether it's hiding anything suspicious or dangerous. When I first started driving back in when the world was black and white,

There were horror stories of people stuffing sawdust into panels and using tape and paint to hide serious effect defects. I'm pretty sure there's a lot less nowadays, but has it gone completely? But the benefit of a private sale is that you don't have to account for dealer profit. So you'll often get a good vehicle at a lower price than buying the same vehicle via a dealer. As always though, it's caveat emptor by beware. So the bit in the middle is the buying.

From an online dealer part. As I said earlier, that's how I did it with my Polestar 2. Let's see how that process went. I wanted a specific model of Polestar 2. It had to be a specific model year, and it had to have specific packs attached to it. Unsurprisingly, finding one wasn't an easy job. Due to the specific nature of the packs, these are often not listed in a searchable way on website. On a website, I had to search for Polestar 2 in my model year, then check the individual detail in the listing.

Gary Comerford (: 07:15

To see if it had the packs that I wanted. Quick sidebar. Polestar twos, in fact, quite a lot of Pulestars come with three separate packs you can specify from new. These are the Plus, Performance, and the Pilot Pack. Car doesn't need any of these to function, but each provides a little extra comfort or functionality. I particularly wanted the heated seats and steering wheeler, as well as the adaptive cruise control, and for that I needed the plus and pilot packs. After several months of searching, I found the model I was looking for in the price range I was looking for.

But this meant it had a reasonably high mileage, fifty five thousand on a five-year-old car. And this raised questions about the battery health, which I knew would need answering. I contacted the company online, placed a 99 pound refundable deposit down to stop the car being sold from under me, and asked them to perform a battery check. The car had literally just arrived on site and they hadn't had an opportunity to do the check yet, so they had their service guys do one. It was an Aviloo battery check.

And we spoke with Aviloo last season and discovered that their battery check it goes it doesn't go into the battery it

Gary Comerford (: 08:21

It was an Aviloo battery check. We spoke with Aviloo last season and discovered that their battery check goes into the battery itself, not the battery management system, to determine state of health, as well as individual cell condition. They sent me a comprehensive health certificate showing that the battery health was fifty thousand with fifty five thousand miles was ninety four and a half percent. That's perfectly acceptable to me considering that this was a five year old vehicle and the phone I'm using at the moment has a battery that's one year old and already at ninety one percent.

I then sorted the finance out with the company, agreeing the initial deposit, monthly repayment amount, and the length of term. Here's where it got interesting. As the car's five years old, the three-year lease would make the vehicle eight years old when the lease finished. Now, eight years is the point at which the battery warranty runs out. From my point of view, I'm not that concerned about the state of battery and whether it will stop working. It won't. But if I was looking to make the balloon payment and buy the vehicle with a view to selling it on at the end of the lease,

That might be problematic. Would you buy an eight-year-old EV with no battery warranty? This is where the lease aspect came into play. Had I bought the car outright, I would have had three years in which to run and sell the thing and still have battery warranty remaining. But as this was a lease, I had a decision to make at the end of the lease about further ownership. Under the terms, I could pay the balloon payment and to take delivery of the vehicle, or I could simply hand it back. This gave me flexibility. If the market for second hand EVs was strong,

I could buy the car and either run it, or sell it on a profit, or at the worst a small loss.

If the market for secondhand EVs wasn't good, or at least it was a buyer's market, not a seller's market, I could literally hand the vehicle back and become a buyer myself. Decision made, I signed the agreement. I took out a three-year warranty covering non-battery aspects of the car and negotiated that into the deal, and the vehicle was delivered to me. Now the downside to deals like this is that it wasn't possible to test drive the car in advance. The deal with Car 360 is that you get the car, then you have seven days to decide if you want to keep it, and if you don't,

Gary Comerford (: 10:22

It's a full money back guarantee. This is useful because it gives you time to live with the car and see if there's any issue you want addressing. A friend of mine got her dream car from Car 360 using the Process Edge Detailed. But when it arrived, she realized the previous owner had been a heavy smoker and the car reeked of stale tobacco. She got into Car 360, told them about this, they took it back, no questions asked. So this is the situation with regard to my vehicle. I leased it on a PCP deal, allowing me to either keep it.

or hand it back at the end of the lease. But not everyone can do that with a second hand car. Some finance deals are for purchasing the vehicle outright, some won't allow you to finance and will expect you to pay in full, usually via a bank loan. And whichever way you choose to pay for your car, an online purchase will need you to do some sort of due diligence. For example, have you heard of this online company before? In the case of Car 360 it was recommended to me by a colleague Ben Kilby who would use them earlier that year.

Well known companies such as Autotrader or Carsupermarket.com have a reasonable reputation in this field. Beware of the startup trying to source cars via third party sites and being a middleman acting as a principal. Does the car feel legitimate? Is it, for example, a low mileage old vehicle with an extremely low price? Alarm bells. Or is it a high mileage vehicle with a high price? More alarm bells. What's the state of the battery warranty? In second hand EVs, the battery is the only thing you really need to be concerned about.

Brakes, tires, motors, these are all generally going to be fine. But if the battery's been mistreated or has h issues.

But if the battery has been mistreated or has issues, this will cause you no end of problems. Getting a legitimate battery check is the easiest way to guarantee peace of mind. So let's talk about the battery check. When we spoke to Marcus Berger from Aviloo, he was adamant that a battery check was critical, and I agree. He was also adamant that Aviloo were the only ones to provide a proper battery check. Now I don't necessarily agree there, but I do agree that battery checks come into two different types.

Gary Comerford (: 12:27

Those that critically analyze the battery cell by cell

Those that calculate state of health using the internal battery management system. Aviloo is one of the former, although there are others. These are, in my mind, the sort of battery checks that are more reliable and accurate. At the end of the day, a check which works its values out by calculating battery usage versus a strict standard, such as those provided by companies who use the phone app, cannot be as accurate as a check that physically connects to the battery and works through on a cell by cell basis. That's why an Aviloo diagnostic is so much more important.

and expensive. It will tell you at the individual battery cell level what the situation is. A single damaged or deficient cell is enough to cause a battery problem and prevent charging. Not knowing the battery cell's state of health, it's one way of missing a potential red flag. I've heard stories of some vehicle checks that have been done on cars with 50,000 miles and found the battery to still be at 100% state of health. That's not possible. What's happening in this case is that measurement has been taken using an algorithm which determines range

Based on battery usage over a distance of travel and extrapolated. This vehicle is then cross-referenced against a known distance figure for a given vehicle to determine a drop-in range and hence battery degradation. But what it doesn't take into account is a situation where the battery buffer at the top end of the battery is released for use to hide any battery degradation. Easy word for me to say degradation. If there's 10% in the buffer and 5% is released to cover for a 5% degradation,

The state of health will read as a hundred percent, when in reality it's ninety-five percent. In fact, the colleague I mentioned earlier who sent a car back because it's stank of cigarette smoke was sent a screenshot of another battery check showing a Genesis G V sixty at a hundred percent state of health despite the fact that the car was two years old and has done several thousand miles. This is plainly incorrect and was a result of the type of battery test done rather than the battery itself. And this is the downside of app based or even OBD dongle based.

Gary Comerford (: 14:29

Checks rather than an in-depth bypass the BMS style check. So once again, caveat emptor or buyer beware. So you've decided you want to go for a secondhand EV. Good choice. As we've said earlier, there's three ways of doing so at the moment. As a buyer, it's up to you. You get to decide which is the best way to do so for your circumstances. And I'll repeat again what I said earlier about the different purchase paths. You can buy from a main dealer.

You can buy online, you can buy privately. Main dealers are probably safer and give better guarantees. Online is probably cheaper, but it comes with its own issues. Privately is the less secure and more prone to issues, but it will be cheaper.

Gary Comerford (: 15:21

I hope you enjoyed listening to today's show.

If you have any thoughts, comments, criticisms, or other general messages to pass on to me, I can be reached at info at evmusings.com. On the socials, I'm on bluesky, evmusings.bsky.social. I'm also on Instagram at evmusings, where I post short videos and podcast extracts regularly. You can follow me there. Thanks to everyone who supports me through Patreon on a monthly basis and through coffee.com on an ad hoc one.

Regular listeners will know about my two ebooks, so you've gone electric and so you've gone renewable. They're 99p each or equivalent, and you can get them on Amazon. Check out the links in the show notes for more information, as well as a link to my regular EV Musings newsletter and associated articles. Now my stats show that a lot of people watch this on YouTube and are not subscribers. So why not hit that button and the notification bell so you don't miss out? Cheers.

Gary Comerford (: 16:30

If you've reached this part of the podcast and are still listening, thank you. Why not let me know you've got to this part by messaging me at musingsev.bsky.social with the words caveat emptor. Hashtag if you know you know, nothing else. And thanks as always to my co founder, Simone.

You know he's happier with his electric unicycle than a second hand car? That's just how he is. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.