A Nearly 59 Percent Value Cliff

A five-year-old electric vehicle has handed back an average of 58.8 percent of its original sticker price by the time it changes hands, according to iSeeCars’ own depreciation study, which tracked more than 800,000 five-year-old used vehicles sold between March 2024 and February 2025. The industry-wide average loss over the same stretch is 45.6 percent. That gap, nearly 13 percentage points, means an EV buyer is losing value at more than double the pace some gas-powered shoppers never have to think about. Meanwhile, at the opposite end of the same dataset, a Toyota pickup and a Chevrolet sports car barely dented their original price tags at all.

“The difference between buying a hybrid versus an electric vehicle could be tens of thousands of dollars in lost value,” said Karl Brauer, iSeeCars’ executive analyst, in the study’s release. It’s not a small-print caveat — it’s the headline finding of the entire report, and it applies whether the EV in question came from a legacy automaker or a startup.

1. Even the Best EV Still Loses More Than Average

Tesla’s Model 3 posted the lowest depreciation rate of any EV in the study, and it’s still not a win. iSeeCars found the Model 3 loses value at a rate more than 10 percent above the industry average — meaning the single best-performing electric vehicle on the market still can’t touch what a typical gas-powered car retains. A separate iSeeCars breakdown found the Model 3 holds onto roughly 45.4 percent of its value after five years, keeping about $16,800 of a $36,990 base sticker. That’s the ceiling for EV resale performance right now, not the floor.

2. The Porsche Taycan Proves Price Doesn’t Protect You

A $105,800 starting price didn’t insulate the Porsche Taycan from the same math. The electric Porsche sheds roughly $57,800 over five years, retaining about 45.3 percent of its value — essentially tied with the far cheaper Model 3. Rapid battery and range improvements year over year, plus federal incentives that don’t transfer to a used buyer, drag premium EVs down the same curve as economy ones.

3. A Toyota Truck Barely Budged

On the other end of the ledger, the Toyota Tacoma depreciated just 26.0 percent over five years — less than half the EV category average. Trucks have run this play for years: tight used-truck supply, strong trade-in demand, and a buyer base that treats a Tacoma as a tool rather than a tech gadget with an expiration date. There’s no battery chemistry quietly aging in the driveway, and no next-generation range figure making last year’s model feel obsolete.

4. The Corvette Held On Almost as Well

Right behind it, the Chevrolet Corvette depreciated just 27.2 percent over the same five-year window — remarkable for a low-volume sports car that typically gets driven harder and further than a commuter sedan. Sports cars and small SUVs dominated the top of iSeeCars’ value-retention rankings generally, while luxury sedans and EVs dominated the bottom.

Independent coverage of the same dataset backs up the scale of the split. A breakdown of the iSeeCars figures published separately notes that EVs typically lose around 30 percent of their value in year one alone — nearly double the roughly 16 percent a gas vehicle loses in the same period — and that a three-year-old EV is often down to 40 percent of its original value while a comparable gas car is still sitting at 60 percent.

Why the Curve Bends This Way

Part of it is simply pace of change: battery range, charging speed, and software all improve fast enough that a three-year-old EV can feel like yesterday’s phone. Part of it is money that never follows the car — federal and state EV incentives lower the effective price for the first owner but do nothing for the person buying it used. And part of it is plain trust: buyers shopping secondhand are wary of unknown battery health in a way they’re not wary of an inline-six with 60,000 miles on it.

None of this means EVs are bad cars. It means the ownership math looks completely different depending on whether you’re the first owner or the fourth. A Tacoma or a Corvette buyer is functionally renting a small slice of depreciation. An EV buyer, even in a Tesla or a Porsche, is absorbing a much bigger one — and that’s before anyone starts talking about what happens to resale value once the next battery generation lands.