Aussie motorists looking to save on petrol costs are turning to alternative markets in hopes of finding a deal on an electric vehicle. The country’s secondhand EV market has grown in recent years while prices have also come down dramatically.
As more EV brands launch in Australia, one area where buyers might be able to find unexpected deals is in the salvage market. That’s where fairly new cars are being offered up for sale with either cosmetic or sometimes relatively minor damage after being passed off by insurance companies for resale.
Buyers have been snapping up more badly damaged Teslas for as little as $11,000 and BYD models for under $10,000 in recent months. Although interest – and prices – are climbing since the onset of the conflict in Iran.
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Prominent auction house Pickles works with a majority of the nation’s big insurance companies and has seen surging interest in EVs and individuals looking to buy salvageable electric cars which they can get back on the road, says Nick Johnson, the company’s GM of the salvage market.
“From a value perspective for them (insurance companies), the salvage value – what it’s worth as a damaged asset plus the cost of repairs, if it exceeds the market value, they will write it off,” he explained to Yahoo Finance.
But that can leave value for other buyers – especially those keen to leave the petrol bowser behind at the moment.
Johnson said the company’s data showed that 60 per cent of recent sales it facilitated of salvaged EVs were to individual buyers.
“So they’re someone like you or I,” he said.
“And the other 40 per cent has gone to organisations, which is a business that is purchasing to repair them, or they might be a parts recycler.”
Pickles says near-new but damaged EVs are drawing intense buyer demand at the moment through its online salvage market. One example is a batch of more than 30 new BYD vehicles that had external damage after an accidental cement spray incident.
The cars where sitting in a yard next to a building site when they were splattered by errant cement mixture. “They were cosmetically damaged from a paint perspective, but the rest of it was still as new,” Johnson said.
The high salvage value meant the insurance company wrote them off for resale with Pickles finding plenty of interested buyers.
