The Expert Podcast

As electric vehicles become more and more of the used car market percentage, you want to remember that the evaluation of a used vehicle is much different for an electric vehicle. If you're buying a gasoline vehicle, you can have somebody check out the engine, transmission, tires, brakes, but an electric vehicle, there's really one component that makes up 60 or 70 or 80% of the value transition of that vehicle of the possible maintenance of that vehicle - that's the battery, the EV battery. And that EV battery could be more than half the value of the car, and you want to make sure it's in good shape.

So evaluating that battery becomes more important, but how do you do it? You know, with an engine you can look to see if the oil is bad, brakes you can look at the brake shoes, for a transmission you can see if it's shifting properly - battery is a little bit different. So how does that work? According to this Newsweek article, when buying a used car, there's an additional thing to consider in electric vehicles - it's called the battery state of health.

State of health changes over the course of its lifespan based on many factors: how often it's charged, if it's fast charged, if it's driven in hot weather, cold weather. And during the battery's lifespan, its usable power storage capacity dwindles. Rate of loss depends on many factors: environment, charging behavior. The biggest factor among EV shoppers is if the battery is good - that's the most important thing.

You will be back in your video in just a few seconds. In the meantime, remember that actual human.com offers you live one-on-one private video consultation with an expert in this exact subject. We want to listen to your story, we want to hear your questions, we want to give you expert advisement of your options and tell you what we know about your particular situation. Now back to your video.

So how do you do it? Well, there's some services out there - you can see the link below for one of them. They can check out electric vehicle batteries, they can check them out for dealers' inventory, they can check them out for individual consumers, they can check them out for repair shops. And checking out that battery is something that you really want to have part of your evaluation process. So if you're a dealer, you want to make sure your inventory is good so you can offer it to the public and not worry about the battery. If you're a potential consumer, you want to make sure that battery is good before you buy a used EV.

Checking out the battery is more important than really any other factor on that electric vehicle. And one of the things that is a little bit of misinformation is if you check at the remaining range when the battery has been charged - that's not really a good measurement of it. If you compare it to what was originally the case, that might not be a good representation of the battery state of health. It's how often it was driven recently, and it can vary quite a bit on how fast you drive it. If even if you have a battery at 100%, if you drive it a certain way, it could deplete very, very quickly.

So get a good evaluation testing of the battery state of health before you buy a vehicle, even if you're a dealer, before you offer the vehicle for sale, so you know that your consumer is buying a vehicle that they can count on, that they're not going to look back at you and say, "Hey, you sold me a lemon."
Thank you for watching another episode of Actual Human Advisory on Describe TV. Remember, we have live one-on-one consultation appointments available at actual human.com where you can book a one-on-one undivided attention live call with a licensed investigator, a licensed insurance broker, a licensed mortgage broker, real estate broker. I'm also a certified real estate title examiner, a certified civil court mediator, along with having developed and started over 15 businesses, several of which were sold for millions of dollars. So if you do have questions in any of those categories, you can arrange a one-on-one live video consultation. Use the link below and we'll see you on the next video.