Alex Robbins is a motoring journalist, used car expert and consumer champion. In this regular CarGurus column, he serves up gems from the used market.
Have you heard of the Dacia Spring? Chances are you might have – it’s been all over the place lately, touted as Britain’s cheapest new electric car, which is fair enough, because it is. Well, as long as you don’t count the Citroen Ami, which isn’t really a car so much as a motorised telephone box.
The Spring certainly serves a purpose – bargain basement, bare-bones transport with an electric motor is what it promises, and delivers. And for £15,000, you can’t say fairer than that.
Or can you? Well, the Spring is pretty basic, with a small battery and limited range, and not very much equipment. To be fair, that’s probably to be expected given it’s so remarkably cheap.
What you might not be expecting, though, is its decidedly sub-par safety record, with parlous crash test scores that suggest it isn’t a car you’d relish having an accident in.
But if you’ve only got £15,000 to spend and you want to buy an EV, surely it’s your only option? Well, not quite – after all, there’s always the used market. And believe it or not, your £15,000 can go a surprisingly long way if you’re willing to buy a car that’s just a couple of years old.
Now is a brilliant time to buy a used EV, after all. Fears about catastrophic battery degradation (which, I might add, are unfounded) are wiping thousands off the value of electric cars once they leave the showroom, leaving savvy second-hand buyers to pick up some tremendous bargains on nearly-new examples.
And finding one isn’t too hard. There are almost 2,000 used electric cars for sale on CarGurus for less than £15,000, and hundreds of those carry our coveted ‘Great Deal’ deal rating.
For example, wouldn’t you rather have a 2024 Mazda MX-30 with just 10,000 miles on it in place of the Spring? Not only do you get a larger car with sharper styling and a smarter interior, but the MX-30 is far sweeter to drive.
And while its range isn’t exactly class-leading, it’s only marginally less than the Spring’s, meaning the MX-30 is just as well suited to the urban environments the Spring is designed for. More importantly, the MX-30’s exemplary crash test scores are light years ahead of the Spring’s.
But if the MX-30 doesn’t quite offer enough range for you, we can do better. How about a 2022 Hyundai Kona Electric with just 9,500 miles on the clock? Even choosing the smaller of the two batteries on offer, the 39kWh option, you still get a 189-mile official rating.
That means it should still go much further on a charge than a Spring – even taking account of a few years’ battery degradation (at the average rate of 2%, that figure should still be around 180 miles by now). And don’t forget, there should still be two years left of the original five-year warranty.
Inside, you’ll find much more room in the Kona than in the Spring, and it’ll ride bumps more comfortably too. You get more equipment as standard, not to mention higher-quality interior plastics, and once again, the Kona shades the Spring with its safety scores.
But we’ve saved perhaps our best deal until last. How about a smart, stylish Vauxhall Mokka E, in top-of-the-range Elite Premium specification, absolutely laden with toys? You can buy a 2022 example with just 9,000 miles on CarGurus for just £14,200 at the time of writing – £800 less than you’d have to pay for a Dacia Spring.
For that, you’re getting heated seats, a heated steering wheel, satnav, Apple CarPlay and Android Auto – the list goes on. The Spring, by comparison, has wind-up windows and a smartphone holder – that’s about it.
The Mokka is a pretty slick little thing to drive, too, and of course, it’ll perform better in a crash than the Dacia. And if you’ve got kids to ferry around, there’s more room in the back, not to mention a bigger boot.
So, there you have it: three cracking second-hand EVs that you can find right now here on CarGurus, for the price of a brand-new Dacia Spring. So next time you hear about Britain’s cheapest brand-new EV, just remember that there are even more enticing bargains to be had if you’re happy to buy used.