Chinese EV Discounting Is Pushing Down Used Electric Car Prices
June's record EV sales were built on heavy discounting, much of it from Chinese brands meeting mandate targets cheaply. That's bad news for anyone selling a nearly-new EV right now.
A record June that manufacturers still can't celebrate
June 2026 was the busiest June for new car sales since 2019: 213,166 registrations, up 11.4% on the same month last year, according to Autocar's coverage of the SMMT figures. Battery-electric cars made up 30% of that total, their best month of the year, with plug-in hybrids adding another 12.5%.
On paper that looks like the ZEV mandate is working. In practice, the SMMT's own reading is more cautious: even at June's pace, EVs are only running at 25% market share year-to-date, well short of the 33% manufacturers are required to hit for 2026. To close that gap, the trade body says carmakers would need to sell EVs at over 40% of the market for every remaining month of the year - a rate the industry has never come close to sustaining.
Why the mandate is handing an advantage to Chinese brands
The way manufacturers are closing that gap matters as much as the headline numbers. SMMT chief Mike Hawes put it bluntly: carmakers are \"investing billions developing and bringing the vehicles to market - and spending billions more to sell them\" - largely through discounting, as reported by Auto Express.
But the mandate's targets aren't the same for every manufacturer. Legacy brands' quotas are calculated against their pre-2021 emissions performance, while newer entrants are measured against industry-wide averages from the year they arrived in the UK - a much easier bar to clear. Ben Nelmes, CEO of New AutoMotive, told Auto Express it's \"a design of the scheme that has meant that some of the new entrants have very low estimated real ZEV targets.\" The practical effect: Chinese brands like BYD, MG, Chery, Geely and Xpeng captured 15% of total UK car sales in the first half of 2026, with the Jaecoo 7 now the third best-selling car of the year and the BYD Seal inside the EV top 10.
Part of that is straightforward pricing power. Comparable models regularly undercut Western rivals by thousands: the BYD Dolphin Surf starts around £18,650 against roughly £30,860 for a VW ID.3, and the Leapmotor T03 comes in near £15,930 versus about £20,995 for a Fiat 500e, according to pricing gathered by go-e's Chinese EV comparison. Not every Chinese entrant is chasing rock-bottom prices, though - Xpeng's UK boss told the Guardian that prices aren't likely to fall much further given the company is still loss-making on its European expansion.
What this means for used-EV prices
Heavy new-car discounting doesn't stay contained to the forecourt - it drags the whole market down behind it. Every time a manufacturer cuts a few thousand pounds off a new EV to hit its mandate number, the used values of similar, slightly older EVs get squeezed too, because buyers can simply compare the discounted new price against a nearly-new used one.
If you're buying: this is a genuinely good window to pick up a one- to two-year-old EV, particularly from a mainstream European or Korean brand competing directly with the new wave of cheap Chinese models. Depreciation on these cars has likely run ahead of where it would normally sit at this point in their life.
If you're selling: temper your price expectations if your car is a similar size and price bracket to the models leading this discount war. A private sale that would have looked fair six months ago may need revising down to compete with what dealers are now offering on nearly-new stock.
The mandate pressure isn't going away this year - if anything, the SMMT's numbers suggest discounting will need to get heavier, not lighter, to hit the 2026 target. Anyone with an EV to sell in the next few months should expect that pressure to keep showing up in used valuations.