A brand new Porsche Taycan will cost you (from) a mere $215,000 NZ but it is a Porsche…and it is pretty fast.
EV bargains to be had
Coming down to earth for a while, the “Icon” of the NZ pure EV Fleet is the Nissan Leaf. There are over 23,000 of these on New Zealand’s roads (about 1/3 of our BEV Fleet) and today (February) over 150 of these are listed on TradeMe at $7,500 NZ or less. So instead of buying that Porsche, you could buy a forest full of leafs and set up your own taxi business!
One of the many bargain Leafs on sale today.
Considerations when buying an EV
Generally, the higher the Battery Range, the higher the price, so a good starting point is to look sensibly at how many ks you drive a day. In their 2022 Benchmarking Sustainable Urban Mobility report Waka Kohati/NZTA published the following graphic showing 58% of all trips by car in Auckland were under 5km – shopping, doing the school run, dropping kids to sport etc. Even assuming 8 – 10 of these trips a day, that would make an 80k range Nissan Leaf (such as the one featured above) eminently practical for an Urban driver with the ability to plug in at home.
Longer Road Trips?
If however, you regularly drive long distances then although a short range EV COULD do the distances, it would mean stopping at public chargers every 45 – 60 minutes and that would not be practical.
In this case, a Used or new EV with longer range would be your best option and the chart below shows current indicative pricing and battery range for the top selling EVs in NZ.
