The time has come for cheaper electric cars with great autonomy

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 gasoline prices is likely to drive more people to electric cars, it probably won’t happen quickly.

But, if there is a positive point in the electric vehicle market, it is the car with great range and lower price — a segment that has been growing in number of models and, in some cases, even in sales.

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Electric cars under $40,000 can now go as far as more expensive models from a decade ago.

So-called “range anxiety” has long been an obstacle for potential electric vehicle buyers, especially in winter. Most people don’t need to drive long distances every day, but they want to know if they can take the occasional long trip.

For a long time, price and autonomy were highly correlated: more expensive models ran much longer on a single charge. This is no longer true. Some expensive cars have an estimated range of over 400 miles — especially some models from Lucid and Rivian — but others offer less range than cars $50,000 cheaper.

Autonomy and price are not the only criteria for everyone — there are recharge speed, power, reliability, aesthetics, size and other factors to consider. But if your main concern is just how far the car can run on a single charge without costing a fortune, it’s worth considering an unusual but useful metric: miles of range per dollar spent.

Starting at $32,000, the 2026 Nissan Leaf offers nearly 10 miles of total driving range for every $1,000 of list price, with the $37,000 Chevrolet Equinox EV close behind. The most expensive electric vehicles perform much worse by this metric—3 miles for $1,000 or less—but they are luxury cars.

(Note that price and range vary even within a single model, depending on the version; we consider the lowest price and longest range of each car and choose the best mile-per-dollar result.)

Just five years ago, the best cars in this metric got no more than 6 miles per $1,000 (adjusted for inflation).

An important part of this evolution is battery technology: Prices for lithium-ion batteries, the main type used in electric vehicles, have fallen to about $100 per kilowatt-hour by 2025, down from $1,000 in the early 2010s, according to BloombergNEF. Battery density has also increased.

With the fall in the cost of batteries and the increase in the production of electric vehicles, autonomy has risen and prices have fallen. Tesla’s cheapest Model 3 now offers 517 kilometers of autonomy this year, compared to 354 kilometers when it was launched in the late 2010s, while its inflation-adjusted price has decreased.

Or consider the Leaf, which debuted 15 years ago. In 2016, the cheapest Leaf had 135 kilometers of range and cost around US$30,000 — the equivalent of US$40,000 today.

The $32,000 Leaf 2026 has a range of more than 300 miles.

Some automakers have launched all-new models under $40,000 in recent years, including the Chevrolet Equinox and Subaru Uncharted.

And the end of the tax credit led others to reduce the prices of existing models: Tesla launched a leaner and significantly cheaper version of the Model 3, and Hyundai cut the prices of the Ioniq 5 by an amount similar to the credit.

Overall, the cheapest range on the market grew rapidly, and the average price of a new electric vehicle fell. (Prices for used electric cars have also fallen, and sales have increased.)

There is still a lot of negative news in the sector, with automakers canceling models and reducing investments in battery manufacturing. Sales of new electric vehicles fell 27% from the start of 2025 to the start of 2026.

But models that offered versions with high autonomy and lower prices seemed to resist the drop better — some even recorded an increase in sales, while others remained relatively stable, despite the end of the tax credit.

New electric vehicles still do not surpass new gasoline cars in list 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 running a gas car add up: if the price of gas stays around $3.50 per gallon (3.78 liters), this relatively efficient Corolla would cost the average driver more than $1,100 a year, plus a similar amount in maintenance. Over a decade, that would amount to almost $50,000 (including the car purchase).

The $32,000 Leaf would cost about $600 a year to run, given average U.S. electricity prices, and about the same for maintenance, according to federal estimates. Within a decade, the total would reach $45,000.

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