It’s a strange time for electric vehicles in the United States. Sales have fallen since the Trump administration ended the $7,500 tax credit and automakers are canceling models. And while the recent rise in gas prices is likely to prompt more people to opt for electric vehicles, it probably won’t happen quickly.
But if there is a bright spot in the electric vehicle market, it is the affordable, high-end car: a corner of the market that is growing in number of models and, in some cases, even sales.
Electric vehicles under $40,000 can now go as far as the most expensive models from a decade ago.
Range anxiety has long been a sticking point for prospective EV owners, especially in winter. Most people don’t need to drive far every day, but they want to know they can make an important trip every once in a while.
For a long time, price and range were highly correlated: more expensive models went much further on a single charge. That is no longer the case. Some expensive cars have an estimated range of more than 400 miles, notably some Lucid and Rivian models, but others offer less range than cars $50,000 cheaper.
Range and price aren’t everyone’s top criteria: there are charging speeds, power, reliability, aesthetics, size, and more to consider. But if your main concern is how far the car can go on a single charge without breaking the bank, consider this unusual but useful metric: miles of range per dollar spent.
With a starting price of $32,000, the 2026 Nissan Leaf gets nearly 10 miles of total range per $1,000 sticker price, closely followed by Chevrolet’s $37,000 Equinox EV. More expensive electric vehicles score much worse on this metric (three miles per $1,000 or less), but they are luxury cars.
(Note that price and range vary even for a single model, depending on the model; we looked at the cheapest price and longest range for each car and chose the one with the highest miles-to-dollars ratio.)
Just five years ago, the best cars in this metric couldn’t exceed six miles for $1,000. (After adjusting for inflation).
A big part of that trajectory is battery technology: Prices for lithium-ion batteries, the main type used for electric vehicles, have fallen to around $100 per kilowatt-hour in 2025, from $1,000 in the early 2010s, according to BloombergNEF. Battery density has also increased.
As battery costs fell and manufacturers built more electric vehicles, ranges increased and prices fell. Tesla’s cheapest Model 3 achieved a range of 321 miles this year, up from 220 when it was launched in the late 2010s, while its inflation-adjusted price fell.
Or consider the Leaf, which debuted 15 years ago.
In 2016, the cheapest Leaf had 84 miles of range and cost about $30,000, the equivalent of $40,000 today.
Nissan’s 2026 Leaf, valued at $32,000, has a range of more than 300 miles.
Some automakers have launched all-new models for less than $40,000 in recent years, including the Chevrolet Equinox and Subaru Uncharted. And the end of the tax credit led others to lower prices on existing cars: Tesla introduced a scaled-down, significantly cheaper Model 3, and Hyundai cut prices on its Ioniq 5 by about the same amount as the credit.
Overall, the cheapest segment of the market has boomed and the average price of a new electric vehicle has fallen. (Used EV prices also fell and sales rose.)
There is still a lot of bad news about electric vehicles among automakers, which have canceled models and withdrawn battery manufacturing. Sales of new electric vehicles fell 27 percent from the beginning of 2025 to the beginning of 2026. But models that offered a higher-end, lower-priced version seemed to weather the crisis better: some of them even increased their sales, while others remained relatively stable despite the end of the tax credit.
The new electric vehicles still cannot surpass the new gasoline cars in terms of price and range. A standard Toyota Corolla can go more than 400 miles on a tank of gas and costs about $25,000.
Still, the costs of driving a gas car add up: If gas prices went back to $3.50 a gallon, that relatively efficient Corolla would cost the average driver more than $1,100 each year, and about the same in maintenance. Over a decade, that would add up to almost $50,000. (Car purchase included).
The $32,000 Leaf would cost about $600 each year to drive, at average U.S. electricity prices, and about the same in maintenance, according to federal estimates. It would total $45,000 over the decade.
