Used cars & stock
What is left of a model year: how long electric cars stay on the register
Of the 13’176 electric cars newly registered in Switzerland in 2019, 11’899 are on the register today. That is 90,3 per cent. For the petrol and diesel cars of the same year it is 89,8 per cent. The two figures are half a percentage point apart. For the years before that the answer comes out differently, and what causes it is not the drivetrain but a handful of models.
Twenty model years, and what is left of them
The ASTRA stock extract carries one line per registered vehicle. We evaluated 7’187’424 lines, among them 4’898’473 passenger cars whose keeper is based in Switzerland or Liechtenstein. Sorted by the year of first registration they show what is left of a fleet across twenty years.
| Year of first registration | Age | on the register today | of which electric |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2006 | 20 years | 77’161 | 9 |
| 2010 | 16 years | 155’136 | 46 |
| 2015 | 11 years | 266’705 | 2’399 |
| 2019 | 7 years | 309’046 | 12’277 |
| 2022 | 4 years | 231’691 | 39’257 |
| 2025 | 1 year | 239’482 | 54’164 |
Cars from 2006 are still running here in their tens of thousands, and 9 of them are electric. That is why so little solid evidence exists on the durability of electric cars. Switzerland has no large model year old enough. The first with more than ten thousand electric cars is 2019, and that one is seven years old.
The rate on its own says nothing
That 90,3 per cent of a model year are still standing sounds good or bad depending on what you expected. The figure only becomes readable next to the same calculation for combustion cars. That comparison is possible because both values come from the same source and are delimited in the same way.
| Model year | Electric | Combustion | Gap |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2016 | 76,7 % | 80,5 % | −3,8 |
| 2017 | 81,5 % | 84,6 % | −3,1 |
| 2018 | 84,3 % | 87,9 % | −3,6 |
| 2019 | 90,3 % | 89,8 % | +0,5 |
| 2020 | 92,8 % | 90,4 % | +2,4 |
| 2021 | 93,3 % | 91,8 % | +1,5 |
| 2022 | 91,7 % | 91,2 % | +0,5 |
| 2023 | 95,3 % | 94,5 % | +0,8 |
| 2024 | 96,3 % | 95,9 % | +0,4 |
| 2025 | 94,3 % | 93,5 % | +0,8 |
From model year 2019 onwards electric cars are level or slightly ahead, before that three to four points behind. The comparison also clears away two oddities you would otherwise stumble over. Model year 2022 breaks the pattern, and 2025 stands worse than 2024 although it is younger. Both hit combustion cars just the same. They are quirks of those years and say nothing about electric cars.
Where the gap of the older years comes from
In model year 2016 three models carry the gap, while the rest sits in the range of the combustion cars. Per model it is the same calculation as above, that is how many were newly registered and how many are still standing today.
| Model, year 2016 | newly registered | today | Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Kia Soul EV | 171 | 68 | 39,8 % |
| Nissan Leaf | 159 | 76 | 47,8 % |
| Mercedes B 250 e | 162 | 108 | 66,7 % |
| BMW i3 | 323 | 250 | 77,4 % |
| Renault Zoe | 406 | 319 | 78,6 % |
| Tesla Model S | 1’299 | 1’085 | 83,5 % |
It becomes clearer still when you follow the same model across two neighbouring years. The Hyundai Ioniq of model year 2018 reaches 40,7 per cent, with 111 of 273 newly registered cars still standing. In model year 2019 it is 93,6 per cent. One year of age difference, 53 percentage points. For the Kia Soul it is 52,5 against 96,5 per cent. Renault Zoe, BMW i3 and Tesla Model S climb steadily across the same years by two to five points each, as ageing should look.
One year of age difference, 53 percentage points. Of the Hyundai Ioniq of model year 2018, 40,7 per cent are still on the register, of model year 2019 it is 93,6.
What happened between those two years we cannot document. Both models received a markedly larger battery in 2019. That is well known, but it appears in no data source open to us. We tried. The ASTRA eDatenblatt, the Swiss type approval, carries ranges per vehicle. A full-text search across all 612’193 lines produced 87 hits on these model names, none built before 2022. The file does not reach that far back. What is measured is the jump; its explanation remains an assumption, an obvious one and an unproven one.
What the figure does not say
The register knows one state only, registered or not. A car that is missing may have been scrapped, exported, put into storage or deregistered between two keepers. For the Swiss used-car market each of those cases means the same. For the question whether a battery lasts they are worth different things, because an exported car keeps driving.
About the condition of the cars still standing the figure says nothing either. Whether a seven-year-old battery holds 95 or 75 per cent of its capacity appears in no public dataset. As we checked on four Swiss listings, it mostly does not appear in the listing either. One of the platforms has a field for it; it was filled in not once.
What follows for buying used
Model years 2019 to 2021 stand on the register with 59’704 electric cars, and they are now reaching the age at which vehicles change keeper. How strongly that wave is already running shows in the change-of-keeper dataset. In January 2022, 1’210 electric cars changed keeper, which was 1,85 per cent of all changes. In September 2026 it was 5’040 and 7,70 per cent. The average age at the change rose from 1,8 to 3,1 years.
What follows from this for prices is an expectation and not a measurement. We hold no used-car prices, and there is no open source for them in Switzerland. What can be said is this. A growing supply of similar vehicles meets buyers who now see new cars with considerably more range standing next to them. Together that argues for softening prices in model years 2019 to 2021 and therefore for room to negotiate. Of that we can document the quantity.
- A model showing conspicuously little retention in its year is a reason to ask questions. The rate says something about the other examples, not about the car in front of you.
- Without a measured battery condition every price stays guesswork. An SoH test costs less than the amount you can negotiate over.
- On durability, model years from 2019 stand no worse than combustion cars. The condition of the individual battery is untouched by that.
What we do not know
- Why a vehicle has disappeared from the register. Export, scrapping, storage and a gap between two keepers look alike in the source.
- How big the batteries of the old model years were. Type approval does not reach back before build year 2022, and the consumption catalogue is under third-party copyright.
- How used-car prices actually develop. An open price source is missing for that, and no market can be read off individual listings.
- Whether model years from 2019 still stand like this at twelve years old. No Swiss model year of appreciable size is old enough for that.
Sources: ASTRA, vehicle information system (IVZ), vehicle stock — the BEST dataset, as of 2 September 2026, evaluated on 19 September 2026: 7’187’424 lines, 4’898’473 passenger cars with keeper based in Switzerland or Liechtenstein. ASTRA/IVZ, new registrations — the annual files 2016 to 2025 as the denominator, delimited identically. ASTRA/IVZ, changes of keeper — the AHOI dataset, January 2022 to August 2026. ASTRA, eDatenblatt — the Swiss type approval, 612’193 lines, for the cross-check on ranges.
Transparency: the retention rate is the quotient of two counted quantities, namely vehicles of a model year in today’s stock and new registrations of the same year. Imported used cars are not in the numerator. They were never a Swiss new registration of their year, and counted in they would produce a rate above one hundred per cent. The model figures pull together the spellings of the source, which are not normalised; the raw names are given per entry in fahrzeugverbleib.json ↗. A rate exists only from model year 2016, because the older registration files lack the country column. Every figure in this article is recalculated from the source files at every npm test and searched for in the text, in all four languages.
