It is true that brands are giving everything for the electric car. However, there are still many doubts that users have regarding this type of mobility, which has caused some to consider the possibility of buying a second-hand electric car. If that is your case, it is also important to keep an eye on some special details.
Pay attention to your used electric car
As such, it is important to know that, if we decide on this type of vehicle, although they require less maintenance than combustion cars, there are some parts that you should pay special attention to.
It’s worth mentioning, too, where a used vehicle has spent its life, geographically speaking, and how it’s been cared for remain major concerns, but the standards are surprisingly different – and perhaps conflicting. – to those of conventional cars.
In fact, second-hand electric vehicles also put an interesting twist on pricing, warranties, and features that a gas-powered car might not care about. But there are aspects such as the battery that have a much greater differentiation, and that is where it is necessary to review it.
Check your battery
In this respect, electric car batteries are more like hybrid batteries than mobile phone batteries: they lose capacity over time , but total failure requiring replacement is very rare.
This should allay one of the main fears when buying a used electric car, but we should still think about what your daily range needs are and make sure you reconcile them not with some new version of the EPA estimated range. of the car, but with a vehicle of its actual age.
Given this, in electric cars you have to go a step further and check the battery status in detail, since it determines how much useful life the vehicle has left.
Warranty review
Given this, the first thing will be to inform us if the electric car still has the battery guarantee . Typically, the warranty lasts for eight years or 160,000 kilometers with a minimum of 70 percent of its original capacity, although there are some cases that exceed ten years.
If it still has it, you will have a point of tranquility, but do not just trust the seller’s word: it is best that you can verify it through some document.
In addition, you must collect as much information as possible regarding the use that the battery has had. The mileage can give you some clue about its degradation, since the higher the number, the more recharging cycles will have been carried out.
Check battery status
After collecting the pertinent information, it is time to do a more exact check. In this, some models allow you to do these checks just by looking at the instrument panel , where there are some that show an icon with twelve bars, each of which corresponds to a percentage of capacity.
That is, as the battery degrades , each of these bars is erased. In this regard, the best option is to carry out the verification in a specialized workshop, which will issue a certificate in which the capacity that it maintains with respect to its initial state will appear.
Diagnosis via OBD
Another method is to connect your mobile phone to the OBD port of the car and, through an application, check the data of the car battery .
The OBD connector is the same connection that is used in workshops to connect the diagnostic machine to the vehicle. Thanks to this, it is possible to read the faults registered in the control unit, as well as check another series of parameters to evaluate the state of the elements.
