2026 is looking like a pretty good year for affordable electric vehicles. There’s a new Nissan Leaf that starts at a hair under $30,000 (as long as you ignore the destination charge). We’re soon to drive the reborn Chevrolet Bolt—with a new lithium iron phosphate battery, it too has a price tag starting with a 2 (again, ignoring the destination charge). And the closer you get to $40,000, the more your options expand: the Hyundai Ioniq 5, Chevy Equinox EV, Toyota bZ, Tesla Model 3, Ford Mustang Mach-E, and Subaru Solterra all fall within that price bracket, and some of those are pretty good cars.
But what if you only want to spend a fraction of that? Well, you won’t be buying anything new, but then neither do three-quarters of American car buyers, and there’s nothing wrong with that. A few weeks ago we looked at what passes for the used EV bargain basement—ones that cost $5,000 or less. As long as you’re OK with limited range and slow charging, going electric on a shoestring is possible. But if you’re prepared to spend twice that, it turns out you’ve got plenty of options.
As before, we really do stress that you should have a reliable place to charge an EV if you’re going to buy one, which means at home at night or at work during the day. At this price range you’re unlikely to find something that DC fast charges quickly, and relying on public AC charging sounds stressful. You’ll probably find a car with some battery degradation, but for the vast majority of models which use active battery cooling, this should be minimal; about two percent a year appears to be the average.
EVs in the US usually come with an eight-year, 100,000 mile warranty for the battery, although cars in this price range will probably be too old to take advantage of it. If you can, have the car checked out by an independent EV specialist; if not, for some models there are apps you can use. Even a test drive would work, particularly if you can fully recharge it and see how much range the car reports.