New car prices

Why are EVs expensive? After all, the battery pack cost is very close to that magical $100/kWh where we are supposed to be at cost parity. Lets look into new car prices on autotrader.ca to see if we have some other market forces at work. We find that new car prices are high, be it for EVs or gas cars, the median being a bit more than $60k for gas cars, and $70k for EVs.

Methodology: We use autotrader.ca to count up all the new cars available within 100 km of Toronto,ON. We also apply a filter to select only electric cars to see how gas cars and EVs compare. We type in a price ceiling, which we vary from $20k to $200k. This gives us the following table.

Lets analyze this a bit further, for starters looking at the whole market EVs are at 7% of inventory, not quite Norway, but getting there. Lets look at what might be called the “price-density-function” e.g. the ratio of cars at a given price-band, and we get this:

Interesting just how similar these curves are. Both have a “first-hump” around the $50-80k mark, with a second “hump” around the $125k mark. In both cases, there is no inventory at below the $20k mark, but you would need 10k more to see some inventory, with EVs being at $50k, and $40k for gas cars. The point, where 50% of inventory is below a price ceiling falls at is between $60k-$70k for gas cars, and $70k-$80k for EVs.

So are EVs more expensive than gas cars? Yes, but gas cars are actually really expensive too, so why not pay a little more and go green.