More than 11,000 battery-electric cars are now listed on one of Australia’s biggest car sales sites, and about 6,500 of them are used or demonstrator vehicles. For a country that was long an EV laggard, it’s a clear sign that a real used EV market has arrived.
How big is Australia’s used EV market now?
Carsales.com.au, one of Australia’s major car sales websites, recently passed 11,000 battery-electric vehicle listings. Around 6,500 of those carry a used or demo tag. EV writer Bryce Gaton recalls that number sitting in the low hundreds just before Covid.
Gaton says listings on car sales sites and at auction houses are growing week by week. Both the number and the variety of available battery-electric cars keep rising.
Of course, 11,000 still looks small next to the 160,000-plus used and demo vehicles on the same site. Even so, used and demo battery-electric cars now make up roughly 4 per cent of that total. Gaton argues that’s enough to make the segment a viable place to hunt for a recent second-hand electric car.
Why was the market so thin for so long?
Australia started slowly. In 2011, the first year anyone collected national figures, buyers took home just 49 battery-electric cars. By the end of 2020, the running total since 2011 was still just short of 17,000.
As a result, the used market of that first decade was very thin. Prices mostly reflected enthusiasts swapping treasured cars, so they said little about true market value.
Choice was narrow too. In 2012, buyers could pick from only three models: the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, the Nissan Leaf and the Tesla Roadster. By the end of 2017, when the Australian Electric Vehicle Association (AEVA) began its fact sheets, just seven models were on offer. Six were passenger cars and one was a light commercial vehicle.
What changed after 2021?
In 2021, Australia saw the long-expected acceleration. It added more than 17,000 battery-electric cars in 12 months, a figure that includes an estimate for Tesla, which didn’t report local sales at the time. In other words, a single year roughly matched the entire previous decade.
Growth didn’t stop there. At 30 September 2026, cumulative sales stood at around 525,000, according to Gaton’s analysis of Statbase and IEA Global EV Outlook data. Almost 500,000 of those cars have reached the road since the end of 2021.
That means most of them are probably still in use, and many are young enough to appeal to second-hand buyers. For readers elsewhere, the numbers offer a useful reference point beyond Europe and the US used EV market.
How many models can used buyers choose from?
By early 2024, the used market looked ready to behave like a normal supply-and-demand market. There was one caveat, though. Whenever a fleet offloaded a batch of Nissan Leafs, Tesla Model 3s or Polestar 2s, it could flood the market and depress values for that model for a while.
Around that time, Gaton started a provisional AEVA fact sheet listing second-hand models available in Australia. The first version covered 19 models. Its latest quarterly update includes 46 passenger models and six light commercial models.
Is a used EV worth buying in 2026?
New-car pricing is part of the picture. In Australia, new battery-electric cars now start from A$19,990 drive-away. Meanwhile, most used examples are less than five years old.
They also carry much the same battery and drive technology as new models. For that reason, Gaton sees the second-hand market as a viable place to buy an EV. He also suggests older cars may come with fewer annoying driver assistance features.
What should buyers check before they commit?
Homework still pays off. Some models received several significant upgrades during their Australian run, and others have even seen the odd downgrade. So buyers should research the exact version and its options before handing over any money.
To help, AEVA publishes individual second-hand model sheets. These track many of the changes each model went through across its production run. Gaton writes the fact sheet series himself, so he isn’t a neutral observer. Still, the listing numbers show a market that has moved well beyond enthusiasts.
