Thanks for reading EV Cents by Recurrent. Each edition brings you clear, data-driven insights from 1 billion miles of EV driving to help you better understand your car and the market.
Second-time EV buyers aren’t asking about range.
John Iannone has been selling EVs in upstate New York longer than almost any franchise dealer in the country, and his EV-only store, Electric Car Corner, was named one of the best places to buy an EV by the Recurrent community. Right now he's watching something most of the market hasn't seen yet: his first wave of EV owners coming back to trade in for their second.
And the question they ask has changed completely.
"They're not really concerned about range. That anxiety has left them," John told us. "What they are interested in is: which car can I get 100 miles charged really quick with? Can I charge another 100 miles in five minutes? That's what they're asking."
These are people who actually lived with an EV, including through upstate New York winters, road trips, the daily routine. And after a few years of ownership, they've concluded that maximum range matters far less than they thought on day one. What matters is how fast the car gets useful miles back when you stop.
Their logic is hard to argue with. On a long drive, you're getting out of the car every 250 miles anyway. The question isn't whether your battery can go 500 miles, it's whether you can add the next 100 in the time it takes to grab a coffee.
Regular readers will recognize this as the exact reason Recurrent measures charging in minutes to add 100 miles of real driving range, not the spec-sheet "20–80%" figure, which penalizes big batteries. Across 2026 models, the average is about 16 minutes. The fastest cars can do it in 9.
What's striking is that John's repeat buyers arrived at this metric on their own — no spec sheets, no charging curves, just lived experience. And the cars rising to the top with them are the ones our data flags: the IONIQ lineup, Porsche's EVs, Lucid. Cars built on fast-charging architecture, not just big packs.
The takeaway if you're shopping: don't necessarily rank EVs by range. Look up the minutes-to-add-100-miles figure for the cars on your list. The buyers on their second EV already figured this out.
From the Market
The 5-minute charge is real.
Remember those repeat buyers asking for 100 miles in five minutes? That exists.
BYD's "Flash Charging" system adds roughly 250 miles of range in 5 minutes, and the company says its 2nd-gen battery does 10–70% in about 5 minutes even in the cold.
I's coming to North America, but not the US. BYD is hiring a team in Toronto to build a Flash Charging network in Canada, where tariffs on Chinese EVs dropped from 100% to under 10%.
For US drivers, the practical takeaway is that megawatt charging is no longer theoretical. And the charging-speed gap between EV generations is about to matter more than the range gap.
Ask Recurrent
Question: "Won't fast charging wear out my battery?"
It's the natural follow-up question. Luckily, the data is more reassuring than the conventional wisdom.
Recurrent studied 13,000 Teslas and found no statistically significant difference in range degradation between cars that fast charge more than 70% of the time and cars that fast charge less than 30% of the time. Lab testing shows that frequent DC fast charging should accelerate degradation, but the real-world conditions aren’t showing it, at least not in the first five or six years.
The sensible caveats: long-term effects past that window are still unknown, so if you're keeping your EV for the long haul, save fast charging for road trips, and avoid it when the battery is very hot or at an extreme state of charge.
One number before you go.
When one of our sellers listed his 2024 Tesla Model Y, he collected offers from every "we buy cars" company you've heard of, and nearly undersold it by thousands. The spread between lowest and highest offer: about $6,500, for the same car, in the same week.
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