When you wreck a vehicle your insurance gives you enough money to buy a similar replacement vehicle. So if you crash your ten year old EV and become part of the 75%, you have the option of either spending thousands more to buy a newer one, or getting another 10 year old EV. That’s how the numbers drop with age and you still end up with an EV that’s on the verge of going tits up.

Right now the price of older EVs is higher than it should be. It’s because people are uneducated and naive about the batteries and how assuredly a well built one will still fail and pretty soon the general population will wise up to it and old ev prices will dive.

There is no getting lucky with an electric car battery beyond it not having any large defects in any of the cells, because every ev battery has so many cells in it there’s no “getting one that was built just right”. The only thing you can do to help is keeping the battery between 30 and 80% charged at all times and not using level 3 or faster chargers on it, and keeping it garaged and not living in a place with extreme heat. That’s going to be the the factors that will make the battery last closer to 20 years than 12 years. That also cuts way into your range and where you can go, of course.