Volt Delta: condition-adjusted clearing prices for used electric vehicles
An investigation into the missing variable in used EV valuation, the battery, and the institutional risk that will arrive at scale from 2028.
The used electric vehicle market is the fastest growing secondary asset class on the planet. A wave of EVs bought and leased between 2020 and 2023 is now hitting the secondary market at scale. Three hundred thousand vehicles came off lease in 2026 alone.
The market has a fundamental problem that nobody has properly solved. Two vehicles with identical paperwork, identical age, identical mileage, can be worth thousands of pounds apart depending entirely on the condition of one component. The battery. Standard valuation tools do not see this. Dealers price blind. Lenders mark portfolios to myth. Fleet managers de-fleet without knowing what their assets are genuinely worth today.
Volt Delta is our investigation into that gap.
The market
The global used EV market was valued at approximately $82 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow at 26.6% annually through 2035. The fastest CAGR of any secondary asset class we are currently investigating. The 2020 to 2022 new EV cohort is now three to five years old and entering the secondary market in volume. Used EV sales in the UK rose 57% in 2024 to 188,000 units. In the US they rose 62.6% to 287,000 units. These are not projections. They are last year's numbers.
The pricing problem is real and quantified. EVs in the UK retain only 49% of their value after two years compared to 70% for petrol and diesel vehicles. Many mainstream models have lost 60% of their original value over five years. Depreciation is steeper and less predictable than for ICE vehicles because it is driven by a variable that standard valuation tools ignore entirely. Battery State of Health.
Two vehicles with identical mileage and age can have battery health readings that differ by 10 to 15 percentage points, representing thousands of pounds in real market value. No mainstream valuation tool accounts for this.
Battery degradation averages 2.3% per year across the fleet as of 2026. But that average masks enormous variance. A vehicle that relied on DC fast charging above 100kW for more than 12% of its sessions degrades at up to 3.0% per year. Double the rate of a vehicle charged slowly on AC overnight. A hot climate vehicle degrades 0.4% faster annually. The condition of the battery is the price of the car. Nothing in the current market connects those two numbers.
The 2028 warranty cliff
There is a second wave coming that makes the timing especially compelling. The standard manufacturer battery warranty is eight years or 100,000 miles. The first large cohorts of EVs sold in 2018 to 2020 begin falling off warranty at scale from 2028. When they do, the artificial safety net disappears. Dealers, lenders, and insurers who have been relying on OEM warranty cover to backstop their risk will face unprotected exposure for the first time.
The systemic demand among institutional risk managers will accelerate materially between 2028 and 2030. Arriving in 2028 with no data and no credibility is not an option. You need two to three years of proprietary data and a proven model before the demand peak arrives. Building now, two years before the cliff, is not early. It is exactly right.
The lived reality
These are not hypothetical scenarios. They are Tuesday morning for the people we are building for.
The dealer. A part-exchange comes in. Three year old ID.3, 38,000 miles, looks clean. You check CAP HPI. You check AutoTrader. You call a mate at another dealer. Nobody really knows. You offer £14,500 to protect your margin. The customer takes it to the franchised dealer down the road who offers £16,200 because they ran a battery test and knew what they had. You lost the deal and you still do not know if your number was wrong or theirs was.
The fleet remarketing manager. It is Q3 disposal cycle. Seventy-three EVs coming off a four year fleet contract. The residual values were set in 2021 when everyone was optimistic. You send the first batch to BCA. The hammer prices come back averaging 18% below your book value. Your finance director wants to know why. You do not have a good answer because you do not have a tool that tells you what these vehicles are actually worth today, condition adjusted, before they go to auction.
The automotive finance risk manager. Your EV portfolio is £340 million of PCP agreements written between 2021 and 2023. The guaranteed future values were set at 42% of original price. The secondary market is clearing at 31%. You are carrying an £11 million residual value shortfall that your current monthly CAP HPI feed does not reflect because it does not know the battery condition of a single vehicle in your book. And in 2028, the first vehicles in that book fall off manufacturer warranty. You have no tool to tell you which ones, when, or what the exposure looks like.
The competitive landscape
There are five relevant players in this market. CAP HPI is the dominant used vehicle valuation provider in the UK and much of Europe. Their methodology is age and mileage based. They acknowledge internally that their EV approach is inadequate. Their product is monthly, static, and institutional. They do not incorporate battery condition.
AVILOO, the Austrian company headquartered near Vienna, is the global market leader in independent battery diagnostics. Their FLASH Test delivers a battery State of Health certificate in three minutes via an OBD-connected device. 75% of used EV buyers already expect a battery certificate. Generational in the UK has been rolled out across all 21 Motorpoint stores. Recurrent Auto is US-based, raised $16 million Series A in January 2024. DAT Group in Germany has introduced battery SoH correction into its valuations.
Critically, AVILOO and Generational certify condition. They do not tell the dealer what that condition means for market value. They produce a certificate. They do not produce a clearing price. None of these players connects battery condition to a condition-adjusted clearing price built on real secondary market transaction data.
The certificate tells you the SoH is 93%. It does not tell you what a 93% SoH Volkswagen ID.3 with 45,000 miles actually cleared for at BCA in Munich last week. That number does not exist as a product today.
The product
Volt Delta serves both dealer and institutional audiences through a single product with three levels of depth. The output confidence reflects the input detail. Users are never forced up the ladder.
Level 1, instant estimate. Thirty seconds. No equipment. Make, model, year, mileage, and an observed condition rating via a four-point slider in plain dealer language. The model derives a clearing price range from these inputs using model-specific depreciation curves and real-world battery degradation data.
Level 2, higher confidence. Optional photo uploads, service history, HPI check, or original sales brochure. The model reads these and narrows the clearing price range. An OBD2 SoH reading can also be entered here, available from any compatible diagnostic app and a standard dongle costing under £25, but it is entirely optional.
Level 3, institutional diagnostic report. For fleet managers, lenders, and insurers. Fleet size, portfolio value, lender context, and warranty cliff exposure mapping. The output shifts from a clearing price range to a full PDF diagnostic report. Defensible to a credit committee. Exportable to a risk management system. This is where the Predictive Warranty Cliff Engine lives.
Who we are talking to
Three audiences. Three different shapes of the same problem.
The independent used EV dealer with 20 to 200 vehicles in stock, increasing EV inventory as lease returns arrive, pricing EVs from monthly CAP HPI guides and AutoTrader listings. The fleet remarketing manager at a corporate fleet operator, leasing company, or rental business, responsible for de-fleeting EVs at end of contract with residual value assumptions from 2022 that are not being achieved. The portfolio risk manager at a specialist automotive finance company with growing EV exposure on PCP and PCH books.
Different roles. Different organisations. Different vocabularies. The same underlying problem. The condition of the battery is the value of the car, and nobody has a tool that connects the two.
What happens next
Volt Delta is now live as a validation portal. Over the coming months we will go directly into this market, speaking to independent dealers across the UK, Germany, and France, and to fleet remarketing managers and automotive finance risk teams in institutions carrying meaningful EV exposure. We are listening first.
If you work in the used EV market as a dealer, a fleet operator, a lender, a surveyor, or an insurer, we would like to hear from you. The aim is not a sales call. We want to understand what reliable, condition-adjusted clearing prices would actually be worth to the people who need them most.
The contact page is open. The Volt Delta site is live at volt-delta.co.
The condition of the battery is the price of the car. Volt Delta is the product that connects the two, two years before the institutional market has no choice but to need it.