2026 looks to be a very good year for affordable electric vehicles. There’s a new Nissan Leaf that starts at under $30,000 (as long as you ignore the destination charge). We’ll soon be driving the reborn Chevrolet Bolt – with a new lithium iron phosphate battery, it also has a price tag starting at Rs 2 (again, ignoring destination charge). And the closer you get to $40,000, the more your options expand: the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Chevy Equinox EV, Toyota bZ, Tesla Model 3, Ford Mustang Mach-E, and Subaru Solterra all fall into that price bracket, and some of them are very nice cars.
But what if you only want to spend a fraction of that? OK, you won’t buy anything new, but three-quarters of American car buyers won’t either, and there’s nothing wrong with that. A few weeks ago, we looked at what used EV bargain basement finds are worth – those priced at $5,000 or less. As long as you’re okay with limited range and slow charging, it’s possible to drive an electric car without interruptions. But if you’re willing to spend twice that much, you have plenty of options.
As before, we stress that if you’re going to buy an EV you need to have a reliable place to charge it, whether that means at home at night or at work during the day. At this price range, you’re unlikely to find anything that charges DC fast, and relying on public AC charging seems stressful. You’ll probably find a car that has some battery wear, but for most models that use active battery cooling, this should be minimal; About 2 percent per year appears to be the average.
EVs in the US typically come with an eight-year, 100,000-mile warranty for the battery, although cars in this price range will probably be too old to take advantage of this. If you can, have the car checked by an independent EV expert; If not, for some models, there are apps you can use. Even a test drive will work, especially if you can fully recharge it and see how much range the car reports.
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