"Electric cars depreciate faster" is the most-repeated objection to buying one, and it is arithmetically true. A study Transport & Environment published on 30 September 2026 argues that most of what the figure measures is not the car losing value.
T&E looked at 2025 used-car transactions in the EU's four largest markets — Germany, France, Italy and Spain — using Autovista data, and found a headline gap of 12.9 percentage points between what a used electric car retains and what a comparable petrol car retains. It then took the gap apart.
Where the gap goes
| Adjustment | Effect on the gap |
|---|---|
| Subsidies and acquisition taxes | −5.2 points |
| Inflation | −1.9 points |
| Fleet composition | +1.6 points |
| Subtotal: adjusted gap | 7.7 points |
| New EV prices falling since purchase | −5.1 points |
| At today's new-car prices | 2.6 points |
The two bold numbers answer different questions, and conflating them is the easiest mistake to make with this study. The 7.7 figure is the gap once you stop comparing a subsidised purchase price against an unsubsidised one, correct for the money itself losing value, and account for a used-combustion fleet that is older and higher-mileage. The 2.6 figure asks a narrower question: how much of a used EV's apparent loss is simply that a new one now costs less than it did.
That last mechanism is worth sitting with, because it is real and it is not the battery. When a manufacturer cuts the price of a new car, every used example reprices downward the same day. Nothing about the three-year-old car changed.
T&E adds two findings that cut against the folklore. Depreciation volatility for electric cars matched combustion cars across both halves of 2025 — used EV values are no longer the unpredictable line. And certified used EVs sold for about 1.4% more and moved 2.7 days faster than uncertified ones, on BCA data, which puts a number on what a battery health certificate is worth.
Read the advocacy, then read the numbers
T&E is a campaign organisation, and this report has a target: it argues the leasing industry uses "overly simplistic" depreciation maths to resist the EU's Corporate Clean Vehicles Regulation. The recommendations follow from that — binding fleet targets, standardised battery health certificates, longer lease terms, car tax reform.
The adjustments themselves are defensible and each is separately disclosed, which is more than most residual-value commentary offers. But an adjusted residual value is an analytical construct. Nobody is paid in adjusted points. A seller today receives the unadjusted number, and the honest reading is that the gap is smaller than it looks and still real.
What it means for a Tesla owner
The study names no brands, so none of these are Tesla figures. They describe the pool a used Model 3 or Model Y sits in across the EU's four biggest markets.
The useful part is diagnostic. If a large share of the gap comes from new-car price cuts feeding through to used values, then the thing that most determines what a three-year-old Tesla fetches is Tesla's own new-car pricing — which has moved more than most. And a buyer being quoted a steep depreciation forecast on a lease has grounds to ask which of these five effects the quote is actually pricing.
It pairs with harder German evidence from the other direction: DAT's figures show used electric values in Germany rising while petrol and diesel fell. T&E explains why the gap was overstated; DAT shows it closing in cash.