EV Insider by Recurrent
EV Insider is the trusted intersection between owners and the car market. Leaders from across the industry join the podcast to share insights and help EV owners make smart decisions when buying and selling electric cars.
EV Insider by Recurrent
The EV Apocalypse That Wasn't with Paul J Daly & Kyle Mountsier
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
Is 2026 the year used EVs finally break through? EV Insider host Scott sits down with Paul J Daly and Kyle Mountsier of ASOTU to unpack what's actually happening in the market right now.
Their conference:
https://www.asotucon.com/
They dig into why there's historically no tight correlation between gas prices and new EV sales — except for one notable six-month stretch in 2022, when EV share jumped 50%. With gas prices spiking again and CarMax reporting a 28% year-over-year increase in used EV searches, the question isn't whether demand is building — it's whether it will convert before prices stabilize.
A big part of the answer is supply. The wave of 2022-era EVs is coming off lease right now, flooding the used market with affordable inventory at exactly the moment consumers are feeling pain at the pump. But there's a catch: many of those original lessees had payments as low as $200/month thanks to aggressive captive finance rates and incentives that no longer exist. How dealers navigate those returning customers — and whether they trade up, buy used, or walk — is one of the most interesting storylines of the year.
Scott also shares some of Recurrent's most surprising findings from six years and 35,000 vehicles worth of real-world data: EV batteries are lasting longer than expected, and most EVs are actually exceeding their EPA range estimates after three years on the road. The data suggests dealers and manufacturers have been underselling the product — and that EV retention rates sit above 90% once someone makes the switch.
The group also debates whether dealers who've pulled back on EV education are walking into a trap, and why Toyota's decision to go all-in on EVs in 2026 — while everyone else is zigging toward hybrids — might be the smartest move in the industry.
EV Insider is produced by Recurrent, the company helping dealers and consumers make smarter decisions with real-world EV data.
https://www.recurrentauto.com/about/ev-insider
I got my little hat here. I got my yeah, there we go. I actually have a black shirt underneath here too, but you know what? Okay, yep, yep, we're doing this. We're doing the whole thing. Out the beard.
SPEAKER_01All right. All right. Welcome to EV Insider by Recurrent, where we make it easier to buy and sell electric cars by giving you access to leaders from across the industry. Let's get started.
SPEAKER_00Uh, you guys are uh, you know, obviously uh on the on the minds of a lot of dealers. Um, what's the big picture that you guys are hearing for 2026? Like we're supposed to be in the Eevee apocalypse. Is that where we're at?
SPEAKER_03I will go on record and have gone on record saying last summer we started having these conversations, even just before uh there was kind of the rumblings of what's gonna happen with the tax credit. And then the tax credit be became a reality that it was going away. And we very early on on our morning show, on a couple of other shows, interviews that we had, we we kind of called this like, okay, we're gonna see a market dip because you're gonna accelerate, similar to earlier in the year when we accelerated purchase behavior uh for other reasons. You're gonna accelerate purchase behavior. But as you see that dip, and this is just consumer psyche, yeah, when you accelerate purchase behavior and put more product into the market, and the EV product is clearly a different looking product. You can see it on the road, you're going, that's an EV, that's a nice vehicle, right? Except for the maybe the Ford Lightning, which is going away. You know, said my kids are going, Dad, why are there more Teslas on the road? Dad, what's that Hyundai car? What's that car with the funky front grille, right? So if my kids are seeing it, that means everybody else is seeing it. So as you hit that dip, all of a sudden, now customers are going, wait, what is this new thing that I want to look at? And so we've seen used EV adoption start to come around and bring us around the corner. And the accelerant of that, and we've been covering a lot recently, and I'm sure you've been talking about, is the Iran conflict.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03The the gas prices rising, affordability questions happening, and used EVs that are coming back into the market are affordable, and you don't compete with gas prices. So that's like the that's what has happened over the last nine months, and we're seeing this unravel. And got some insights over what I think the next six months are.
SPEAKER_00All right. So the used EVs are the are the are the place to be. Well, if we back up, I mean, you guys wrote about recently like Edmonds data is showing that there's increased searching activity, but there's not, you know, at least by the numbers or by the folks you were talking to, not quite the translating into buying yet. Is that is that kind of what you're seeing?
SPEAKER_02You know, it's the early indicator because I think the search the search is indicating that it's coming. CarMax data, they just released their Q1 data, and uh their their year over year is up 28% in searching out Used DVs on their internal data. So people are looking. So I think the gas prices, I mean, this this whole thing with Iran conflict in oil is only at the point of this recording, it's only like three weeks old. And so I think all that market, the people who are thinking or are about to enter the market, like there are paying attention to gas prices as a top-level consideration um as they're thinking of vehicle ownership because they're feeling the pain every time they go to the pump. And I think that's gonna very quickly convert because um, even when you look at the used car pricing, a lot of brands, the EV now is still priced below its ice equivalent. Because and so I think you it's a perfect storm of affordability, high gas prices, um, and and I'm I'm here for it. I drive I drive a Ford F-150 Lightning, and that's going away. I'm sad about that, but I have mine, and um, I I still think everybody I tell, and when you're driving a big truck like that, too, it's like gas prices matter a lot.
SPEAKER_00So, so when when when we went back and looked at the data, so you can look at gas price data all the way back to you know 2010 and compare that to EV sales, it turns out there's not actually a tight correlation, you know, like it's not the case that like gas prices go up and people run to the dealership right away. And then even if you look over one month, three months, six months, there's actually similarly like there's not a tight correlation, except for one period. And that was 2022 from June to November, gas prices went high and stayed high. And during that period, EV uh share increased by 50%, you know. So it did translate into a big run up in EV sales, but it only if it stayed for a while. So I think the question in my mind is like, is that where we're at, or is it gonna be just volatile and go back down?
SPEAKER_03If you think back to 2022, that was the first time that you saw wider adoption of vehicle of new vehicles being accessible in the market. 2022 model year coming out of 2021. And you'll you would have the data more than me, but but I remember GM and Hyundai both coming online with new with new makes in the EV world that we hadn't ever seen before. So you had a critical point where like EV accessibility and gas prices kind of met in this perfect little marriage, right? And then we leveled out. You have easy accessibility. The early adopter phase is still kind of taking on. It's not accelerating as fast as we want. We hadn't hit the dip at that point. Um, but and and this is all at time of recording. There's a lot of question marks around uh actually at time of recording, one day prior, uh President Trump said, Hey, good news. We got five days of break in Iran. We might be fine, right? So you know, this this may this may not draw out, but I think it may not age well. It may not age release it. Uh but the the other impact factor, and I'd love to hear from you just really quickly, uh Scott, is that we are, I think it's somewhere in the like two to six month range from seeing that 2022 vehicle come back off lease.
SPEAKER_00Yeah. So now if you go back the other thing, so we, you know, not a strong correlation between gas prices and new EV sales, except for the one period, right? In 2022. But if you go and look at gas prices, has the impact used versus new, just all used versus new, that's really clear. You can go back to the 70s, and like every time gas prices spike, new vehicle sales collapse, and used vehicle sales do fine. So people really make that trade-off. I think what we're seeing now is like 2026. The big theme to me is 2026 is the first time where we've had the opportunity for that to happen, and also for there to be a huge supply of used electric cars. So that feels like that's what's gonna drive the rest of this year.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I would agree with that. And I also you think about what's happened in the last three years is that more and more EVs on the road, which means more and more familiarity. They started hitting the rental fleets right around that time. So I think like the the broader adoption of it means that more people either have driven one or they have a friend or a neighbor who has one or has driven one. So I think the mystique being taken out of it makes it a much easier step into than that it was back in 2022 when it was like new technology.
SPEAKER_00Did I tell you guys my EV infectious disease theory? Yeah. This is like, I don't know. We'll see. I think we're far enough away from COVID that this is a good thing. Okay, give it to us. So, like the first person that buys an EV in your like neighborhood, in your cul-de-sac or whatever, that's like patient zero, especially if they park it outside. It honestly it it spreads like a like uh like the flu or like COVID or red on, and everybody get everybody else in the cul-de-sac gets infected because all of a sudden it becomes normalized.
SPEAKER_02I I think that's a that's a valid theory because they're just the unknowns, the they're just unknowns, right? People don't move toward change, right? They fear and they move away from change in general. And then in the beginning, just like anything, all you hear are the horror stories, right? On the news, it's like this person got stranded, this car caught on fire, that right, and it's the one out of millions of other instances where it was fine, and you only hear the bad things. So it just takes a little bit of time for you to see, like, oh man, that's a nice looking. It always starts with that's a really nice looking car. And then they're like, Oh, that's an EV. Why is it making that weird noise when it drives by my house? Right, and then you have them out there watching me talking about how they don't have gas. And I I I think your theory holds up.
SPEAKER_00I love the yeah, Kyle's Kyle's little impression of an Eevee backing up.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, that little duotone. I want to bring one more thing up because this was this one has been interesting to me. And I had this question, and we really started talking about it back in uh January. We were at the DC uh auto show chatting with uh a gentleman from from Cox Automotive who runs all of their uh battery reconditioning and and um and and storage uh migrations. But yeah, the interesting data that's now coming out, and you all have a lot of data on this, uh that there was always a question mark about how long are these batteries actually gonna last, right? And so that it was always also a question mark. Then the downstream question is like, well, so then how are Used D V sales gonna go? And what we're finding out as an industry is they're lasting a lot longer than we thought they would, especially in moderate climates.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_03So, so you uh as that education gets into the market, and and if you're a dealer that's great at educating the market on that, you no longer have this fear around, well, ah, the battery is gonna be 50% of what it was three years ago, which is not the case.
SPEAKER_02They are to replace. Yeah. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00Can I tell you guys the biggest, maybe the biggest surprise and the biggest misconception that we have seen in six years of re cur collecting data on these cars at recurrent, um, is that is EPA range, right? So EPA range, wrong on day one. We've known that, but it's wrong in surprising ways. And the thing that's really come out with us in the past like sort of six months or so, we've migrated to like all of the range statements that we make in our products, in our reports, all real world driving range now, because we collected enough data from cars. And um, one of the biggest sort of like misconceptions is that uh after three years, most EVs, after three years on the road, most EVs are still exceeding their EPA range when it comes to what they get in real-world driving conditions. What do you mean when you say exceeding? Exceeding what was stated in the beginning? So every manufacturer can run their own, they they run their own EPA range testing. And that's what that's what the number gets. There's a protocol for it, and there's all kinds of things. Turns out most manufacturers were quite conservative on that. And when we observe, like we have 35,000 cars driving around the, you know, driving around just in regular driving, uh, that we've now collected been collecting data on for six years. And what I what we're seeing is that most of them, when you look at real-world driving conditions, they're exceeding their EPAs, even after three years. Wow, that's nuts. Honestly, like I think all those manufacturers and all those dealers are underselling what they're what they could be doing. Like, it's a better story than than even the EPA number.
SPEAKER_02And I think the ditch everybody.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_02The ditch here.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, I mean, uh no, this is not not every single manufacturer. We can see which ones were more conservative and were more aggressive. And we're not going into that. Who is who knows? You want to you want to find out, you can DM me after.
SPEAKER_03I think the ditch also, the scary part for me, is similar to how uh at least the American manufacturers, the big three, have pulled back on EV investments. They've taken these massive cuts over uh, you know, in Q4 uh to kind of right size the boat for 2026. And they've they've changed even the way the facilities, their factories are are are looking toward hybrids or even retooling back to ice. The the other ditch that we can fall in, especially as dealer operators, is taking the bait on that because the UCVs are still in the market and they're still gonna come back in the marketplace. Like you just said, there's a bunch of supplies. So taking the bait on, oh, my manufacturer isn't gonna have these new cars readily available or overstocked. And so I don't need to even educate around that. I don't need to educate my employees, I don't need to educate the the client base is the real scary ditch because if we don't educate the client base or we don't educate our employees, this supply will overrun us again. We'll get into a supply issue like we did in late 2024. And that's that's really that's really not great to use vehicle values or profitability around these EVs.
SPEAKER_00One thing I'm I'm interested in, you know, as we think about supply and demand balance, is one of the big things you mentioned it earlier is gonna be happening is people coming back at the end of their lease. They had a two or three year lease, and they're they're walking back into the dealership with that their lease is expiring on an EV. Uh, the next sort of like couple of months is really gonna ramp up. A lot of those customers had incredible incentives, and so they have incredibly low monthly lease payments. And uh they probably can't get that now anymore. So, like, I'm really curious. I mean, I've been talking to dealers about like how how are you having that conversation? You know, what does that person go to next? Like, how do you sort of like it's not gonna make that swallow the pill make them swallow that pill around? Yeah, your monthly payments are gonna go up probably by a lot. Wow. The same car, right? It'll be the same car, yeah.
SPEAKER_02When it's right, same car, your monthly payments gonna go up significantly. There's so much cash on the hood, and like they were captive finance was being so aggressive with lease rates in general, and a lot of those, I I think you know, a lot of those that I'm remembering now, they were like 12 month, 18 month, 24 month leases because they had to like lower the stakes for someone to get in an EV the first time around. And that is gonna be a fascinating difference to see what happens because it's gonna be a lot higher per month. Like if you're driving, like say it's a$35,000 or$40,000 EV, you probably leased it out at a rate that was under$20,000 at like under$30,000. You know, like in the end, sale price subsidized. Yeah, oh my goodness.
SPEAKER_00I mean, there's still there are a lot of people are gonna be walking back into dealerships with monthly payments of$200, you know.
SPEAKER_02Right? That didn't exist. Like, I think of how many Honda prologues Brian Ben stock sold, right? In New York City. He used to joke, right? Like you buy a prologue, it comes comes with a 500-foot extension cord because you're in the city. But he's like, What can I do? Like, I'm getting people with something that's as fast as a Ferrari for 200 bucks a month.
SPEAKER_00I mean, that's something I'm really like. I've been talking to some dealers, and and you know, I'm I'm really curious about how everybody is sort of handling that and is planning to handle it. Keep our eye on that. Yeah, yeah. And for my money, I mean, I like based on the data and based on what we're seeing, those people, generally speaking, if they've been in an EV for 12, 24, 36 months, they're not going back to a nice car. They are staying in an EV. And the question is, do we they go to a used unit now or do they upgrade to the newer one? Is the new version of their car like awesome enough of an upgrade, range wise, charging speed-wise, tech-wise, like that they're they'll pay extra? Probably for some people, yes, but not for everybody.
SPEAKER_02Do you happen to know what like the EV retention rate is? Like people that drive an EV, like when they buy a new car. Do you know what upwards of 90%? Yeah, I would I would imagine so. I'll tell you what. My I have an F-150 Lightning, my other car is like a big SUV, gas-powered SUV. Um, and it's a really nice one. And my wife is always like, Can I take the truck? Because she loves her the first time she drove it, I'll never forget. She goes, It feels so pretty, is what she could how she explains.
SPEAKER_00It feels pretty. That's such an interesting place.
SPEAKER_02Smooth when it accelerates, it's quiet. That the control when you're braking because regenerative is so and like I actually get annoyed when I drive the more expensive SUV that's gas powered. I'm like, I I don't even like driving this thing. I can't imagine.
SPEAKER_00Also, like I don't feel pretty in this. I don't feel as pretty as I do in my truck. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02But on the flip side, all my neighbors are farmers, so they're like diesel tax and they farm, right? So I'm always like, no, no, no, you have to drive it, right? Because they're like an electric vehicle. I'm already the yuppie in the neighborhood, right? And I'm a report, no, no, no, of course I have an electric pickup. And then I get them and I let them drive it. And I'm like, oh, yeah, by the way, you can power that, you know, that 240 volt water pump with this thing in the middle of your field and not have to worry about. And they're all like, maybe I'll look at it.
SPEAKER_00So on the news side, I mean, a lot of OEMs are pulling back from their, you know, EV sort of production this year. And you guys have written about that. Lots of people doing massive write-offs. I'm curious what you what you make about Toyota going the absolute other direction, right? Zigging where everybody else is zagging. I mean, if you think about their lineup that they're rolling out this year, right? The BZ 35,000, the CHR EV at 40,000, the BZ Woodland, which is like the outback killer, the super outback killer for 45, and then a three-row electric highlander. Like, well, what do they know that no that everybody else is missing? The same thing they knew the last five years. And they and they did this before gas prices went through the roof. Like they made a commitment here.
SPEAKER_02If if I could inscript one thing, you know, everybody had all the Toyota dealers you go into now, their office, you see, they have the big sword, you know, that they were gifted sitting on their desks. It's in the showroom. I think if you pull it out of the sheath, it says hold my beer on it. Because like because every time, every single time the whole industry does this, they're like, Oh, yeah, you know what? We'll apologize we'll we'll play the political game, we'll do all that. And they did that. And like Kyle and I always like, I'm never once betting against Toyota ever. Ever. Because they understand consumer behavior, they understand the quality of the product they can produce and their manufacturing process better than anybody else. And um, I don't know, I think everybody else would be well served to look at what they're doing and try to copy some of it.
SPEAKER_00I'm curious uh what you guys have in store for a SotoCon coming up in a couple of months here. I mean, obviously, dealers are not able to lead these EV conversations with like, hey, there's money on the hood anymore, right? So that they're having to do it in different ways. That is that one of the things you guys are covering at your event um in in May?
SPEAKER_02For sure. Uh, we really do cover an extremely broad, broad topic range because they all are so intertwined, especially when it comes to uh inventory, used car acquisition, uh sales process, customer experience. So without a doubt, this will be part of that conversation and mix because it anything that's elevating, we wait longer than anybody else, any other event in the industry to lock topics for this very reason.
SPEAKER_01Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Because if we lock them three months ago or however many months ago, actually, as of time recording, we're just over six weeks away. We're like seven weeks out, and just now we're starting to put topics in panels because we have a broad range of dealers and industry partners who can speak on these topics, but for sure, EV time conversation is firing up uh pretty pretty heavy right now. So it will certainly be a big part of the conversation. And like, you know, a lot of our friends are just great at EVs, and so for sure, it'd be it'd be stupid not to talk about it and get the content and and have people most importantly, I think, share the information in person when you're there. What are you doing? What are you doing? Let me get your number, let's bounce some ideas around. Like, we all know that's how you really get a sparring partner that's gonna make a difference for you throughout the year.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, well, yeah, if you had locked uh this down, you know, six months ago, you wouldn't have seen the gas prices. I mean, yeah. That's right. Forget it. Yeah.
SPEAKER_02Last year, what was what was the one, Kyle, last year that we were like, you know, I felt like like, hold, hold, don't release it. It's the cars rule. The car's rule, yeah.
SPEAKER_03Which which, if we would have, if we would have locked down December, the cars rule, we would have been looking real stupid with egg on our faces.
SPEAKER_02Like, yeah, it's like literally, we didn't even hear it mentioned once at a Sotocon, but it like 90 days before it was all we were talking about.
SPEAKER_00We're gonna have to do a part two on this at some point because I really want to talk about uh you guys were writing about all the EV registration fees and the discussion that's coming up. Oh, yeah. I had some hot, hot data on that that I love to talk through. There's a whole bunch of other things.
SPEAKER_02So um count us in, count us in. These are great combos.
SPEAKER_00This is fun. All right. Thanks, guys. It was good to catch up. Our pleasure. Thanks, guys. All right, see you soon.
SPEAKER_01Thanks for joining this episode of Eevee Insider. Be sure to like, comment, and subscribe. And we will see you next time.