Modern electric vehicles have now been on sale long enough to have their own impact on the used vehicle market. And as is the case for new vehicles, they’re becoming more and more popular among buyers.
As one of the largest used vehicle retail networks in America, CarMax is interested in these trends and released the results of its Spring 2023 Electric Vehicle Consumer Report. It found that since about March 2022, searches for electric vehicles have risen dramatically.
Between February 2022 and February 2023, search volumes for terms containing the word “electric” doubled. Now, they make up 5.6 percent of all searches on CarMax.
Read: Californians Have Bought Over 1.5 Million Zero-Emission Vehicles
As has long been the case, the used EVs people are buying the most are Teslas. The two most popular on CarMax are the Model 3 and the Model Y. The larger Model X has fallen from the top five and is now the seventh most popular EV on the website, just ahead of the Model S, which is the eighth.
The most popular non-Tesla EV is the Nissan Leaf, followed by the Ford Mustang Mach-E, the Chevrolet Bolt, and the BMW i3, all of which have now been on the market for a few years.
What is perhaps more interesting than what people are buying is what people trading in, however. CarMax reports that most people are leaving Toyotas in order to buy a used EV.
Sitting at the top of the Toyota list of models traded in for an EV is unsurprisingly the Prius, with most owners switching to a Nissan Leaf, CarMax data shows.
Meanwhile, it will surprise no one to learn that the state where the most used EVs are being purchased is California. It is followed by Washington, Nevada, Oregon, and Arizona, suggesting that the West Coast is ahead of the rest of the country when it comes to EV adoption.
