Tesla owners are trading in their EVs at record levels, Edmunds says | Hacker News Reader

Tesla owners are trading in their EVs at record levels, Edmunds says

cnbc.com

45 pointsceejayoz32 comments

https://www.cargurus.com/research/price-trends/Tesla-m112

That seems to show a surprisingly small effect. Tesla prices down 3.5% over the last 90 days vs the general market down 1%. Which in terms of buying and selling cars which tend to depreciate 50% or so from new to a couple of years old, is not really noticeable.

> The average used Tesla price dropped 13.6% year-over-year in February, more than any other brand, according to iSeeCars, while the overall used car market was essentially flat, declining less than 1%.

https://www.chicagotribune.com/2025/03/22/backlash-musk-tesl...

My opinion is that Tesla is on the precipice of a disaster. Nothing to do with their vehicles themselves but just the market cycles. Apparently, a Tesla/EV Armageddon is coming in 2026 where returning EV leases are supposed to skyrocket by over 230%. Many Car Channels were talking about this last year saying to hold off on buying a used EV because the market is about to be saturated in 2026. I found an article from Nov 24 that discusses the situation.

https://www.autobodynews.com/news/returning-ev-lease-volume-...

Here in the UK my understanding is that the majority of EVs are leased, especially because more and more employers offer salary sacrifice schemes. I.e. the monthly lease payment is deducted from salary pre-tax, which means an effective discount of 40+% as people avoid income tax on those payments.

There are growing warnings that the market is heading for a crash because of the incoming glut of returned vehicles hitting the used market combined with the low resale value EVs have to begin with.

And Tesla seems to be underperforming the overall EV market in terms of growth and market share lately. It will be interesting to see how that trend continues

I agree, Tesla was in a precarious position before Elon Musk decided to sabotage the company by being, to put it mildly, derisive. It would be hard to find a way to sabotage the company more effectively.

Globally, BYD and other Chinese-made electric cars are getting very close to Tesla in terms of price / quality as is Hyundai/Kia and other traditional auto makers. There are also premium upstarts like Lucid and Rivian that are cutting into the high-end not to mention BMW, Audi, Mercedes and every other car manufacturer. Tesla is getting squeezed and their development of new car models is not nearly fast enough to keep consumers interested.

A lot of right-leaning people won't buy an electric car out principle of it being seen as "green" and now a lot of left-leaning people won't buy a Tesla out of principle because they dislike Elon. And even if you ignore all of that or don't care you have to deal with the fact that if you drive a Tesla lot of people will automatically think you are a jerk.

Add all this to a still wildly inflated stock price and you have a potential nightmare scenario for Tesla as a company.

Musk say they are going to sell many robots.

It's kind of the case with any fancy car though that you sell a bunch to wealthy people for $70k each, then three years later they are sold to average people for $30k and then eight years later to the hard up for $5k. It's business as usual. I bought my thing around the $5k end.

Wouldn't that be just a function of there being _a ton_ of old Teslas out there? That number will go up over time - they sold 634K cars in the US in the last year alone, about a half of the overall EV market. Expect a lot of trade ins, some of them for other brands, in 6-10 years.

Yes, if the numbers are relatively organic. This article doesn't provide much in the way of details, but many others have shown an outsized sales affect, especially when other EV manufacturers are actually growing sales.

Why is nobody talking about the Nazi salutes Elon threw up on national television at the presidential inauguration? If you read the graffiti on the wall at the Tesla dealerships you might get an idea of why the brand turned sour.

A lot of people talk about that. It has changed the brand perception a tad.

and TSLA hardly refuses to budge. it should be in freefall.

It's down 30% in the last month?

It dropped 30% this month.

Dropped a lot, there were a lot of media reports about it dropping, was level the last week, up 2.7% this morning now that Musk called an all hands. Who knows how long that lasts. I can't believe the autonomous driving story: here's your proof that cameras alone can't work:

https://www.newsweek.com/tesla-automatic-driving-test-crash-...

Why would a stock go up 2.7% because of an internal meeting with employees?

Investors were worried Musk was AWOL from Tesla because of the DOGE thing and have been asking for a response from him. They got it.

He called a meeting begging employees not to sell. That sounds like desperation and makes this a great time to sell.

The entire market is down. I don't know the overall percentage, but everything is down right now.

There's many tools to compare this. Over 3 months, Tesla is down 41% to the Dow's 5%; in the last month, it's 27% vs 2%. In those same time periods, other car manufacturers are actually beating the market.

It takes time for the Big Money to leave and stick the small guy with the loss. By the time the retail investor figures it out, it will be far to late.

Market, irrational, solvent, etc. The ~$1.4B in accounting irregularities will likely cause more institutional divestment, even if securities fraud suits don't materialize.

https://www.ft.com/content/62df8d8d-31f2-445e-bfa2-c171ac43d... | https://archive.today/A1shA

https://electrek.co/2025/03/19/tesla-tsla-accounting-raises-...

It's down almost 50% over a 3 month period. I'd hardly call that "refuses to budge".

The real money is in used cars, so no downside for Tesla here.

> Edmunds also said that shopping for new models of Tesla vehicles on its platform dropped to its lowest level last month since October 2022 after peaking as late as November.

Looks a bit downside-y?

That and the fact that EV resale prices are low. I'm not sure the "used cars is how you make the real money" rule applies to EVs when they have notoriously bad resale values compared to ICE cars.

Tesla doesn't sell used cars.

Tesla doesn’t sell used cars *yet!

https://www.tesla.com/inventory/used

Tesla resells some trade ins

Tesla will charge you $10k for a repair when you ding your used car though.

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