The used-EV reliability scare is running out of evidence

Would you buy a used EV with 150,000 km on the clock? For years the instinctive answer was no: the battery must be shot, and the car must be a ticking bill. The latest data suggests the instinct is aimed at the wrong target.

The inspection data points the other way

The evidence is a large analysis of 47.4 million technical inspections in the UK, tied to a BVRLA study, as Motor.es reports. Its headline: electric cars with high mileage fail less often than comparable petrol cars. El Confidencial puts the gap at around 25% in that mileage band, meaning the EVs analyzed were about a quarter less likely to fail.

We think the sample size matters as much as any single percentage. This is not a handful of owner anecdotes; it is a very large dataset pointing against a belief many buyers treat as settled.

One detail stood out to us. Weight is the obvious suspect for EV wear, yet News365 notes that between 100,000 and 150,000 km, EVs showed suspension defects in 4.7 of every 100 cases against 6.1 for combustion cars. The heavy-car-wears-out-faster story, at least at the inspection station, isn't showing up.

Fewer moving parts show up in the failure sheet

Our reading, and it is an interpretation, is simple. An inspection checks what wears out: brakes, tires, suspension, lights, and on combustion cars, emissions hardware. An EV has no exhaust, catalytic converter or particulate filter to degrade. A different dataset, Spanish figures cited by Marca on cars over 15 years old, shows emissions account for 22.3% of serious defects in that group. It isn't the UK study, but it illustrates the point: that is a whole failure category an EV simply doesn't have.

The sources also point to a divergence as the odometer climbs. According to laSexta's summary, between roughly 96,000 and 145,000 km the EV failure rate sits around 16%, while the combustion rate keeps rising. If that holds, the old rule of thumb that more kilometers always means more risk fits combustion cars better than EVs, at least when the test is an inspection.

The caveats the headline skips

Be careful before turning this into a verdict. An inspection is not a full mechanical audit. It doesn't tell you the battery's state of health, and a pass says nothing about a repair bill that never reaches the test. The data is also from the UK; inspection rules differ from market to market, so US buyers shouldn't extrapolate blindly. And a survivorship effect is plausible: high-mileage EVs may be newer and better maintained than high-mileage petrol cars. We can't say from the sources how the study controlled for that.

Battery worry is still the core of the used-EV debate. Forococheselectricos argues that degradation, long the main argument against second-hand EVs, may be less severe than assumed, but that is a separate question from the inspection data and deserves its own check on any specific car.

What buyers should do

Stop treating the odometer as a verdict. In our view, a 150,000 km EV with a documented battery health report is a smaller gamble than a petrol car of the same age with an unknown history. Ask for the battery data, check tires and brakes, and negotiate on those.

The losers here are sellers who still price used EVs as if mileage were a death sentence, and the lazy shorthand that "EV equals risk." The market's fear of high mileage looks outdated, and we expect it to fade as more data like this circulates. The next job is replacing it with a better question: not how far it has gone, but how well it has been looked after.