As far as electron-powered head-benders go, the Porsche Taycan Turbo GT runs with the front of the pack. We’re talking 1,019 horsepower, zero-to-60 mph in under two seconds, and active suspension for a remarkable sense of control. It’s the sort of car that could give you a god complex as it completely and utterly recalibrates your benchmark for quick. The top Taycan is also an expensive German luxury sedan, which means that when this one popped up on Cars & Bids, its sheer depreciation made me wince.
For much of the past half-century, nothing has depreciated quite like expensive German luxury sedans. Scores of S-Class, 7 Series, A8, and Phaeton owners (okay, maybe not scores of Phaeton owners) can testify to taking a serious value hit come trade-in time. However, when electric cars became mainstream, they started to push the envelope on depreciation, too. So what happens when you combine these two traits? Let’s have a look.
This particular Taycan Turbo GT’s story starts in November of 2024, when it rolled onto the lot of Porsche Palm Springs sporting a window sticker featuring $20,490 in options. The Pale Blue Metallic paint was $2,850, the upholstery and trim ran an extra $2,020, the dimming panoramic roof was $4,760, the RS Spyder Design wheels were $600, the illuminated Porsche wordmark on the rear was $460, the Burmester sound system was a whopping $5,810, the passenger display was $1,490, the 360-degree camera system was $830, and the HUD was $1,670. The grand total? A heavy $252,485, including freight.
The first owner took delivery in March of 2025, initially as a six-month lease, probably as a way of gaming the EV tax credit of the time. This Taycan’s Carfax report then shows that the first owner bought out the lease after 3,855 miles and enjoyed this ridiculously powerful EV for around 150 more miles before choosing to have it listed for sale that September. Talk about short-term ownership.
From there, the second owner took delivery, and the car went to North Carolina, where it racked up nearly 5,000 more miles with no funny stories. Dealer service history? Check. A clean report as far as collisions and other claims go? Check. Paint protection film to keep it nice? You bet. However, a mere seven months after the second owner signed on the dotted line, the decision was made to send this Taycan Turbo GT on to its next keeper via a Cars & Bids auction.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, there aren’t many of these up for sale on the second-hand market, and asking prices in traditional classified ads vary wildly. Only one had gone under the gavel before, and not only was it the Weissach Package model with no rear seats, but it failed to meet reserve on Bring A Trailer. We were about to see what a second-hand Taycan Turbo GT was actually worth, and as the bids crossed the $126,000 mark, the pace really heated up. It would end up topping out at $162,000, but there was a bit of a problem: That high bid didn’t meet the seller’s reserve price.
Normally, this would mean the excitement was over, but not only does Cars & Bids allow seller and top bidders to try to close the reserve gap after the auction’s over, it posts the actual transaction price for all to see. So, what’s an 8,700-mile 2025 Porsche Taycan Turbo GT actually worth? In this case, $168,000. Oof.
For those keeping track at home, that’s $84,485 in depreciation in a little over a year since the first owner took delivery, or $9.71 in depreciation per mile, or $188.58 per day. While that doesn’t quite catch the per-day depreciation of the Lucid Air I wrote about in 2024, this Taycan Turbo GT was previously owned for a significantly longer period of time.
Again, $188.58 per day, before factoring in interest and insurance and servicing costs and taxes. That’s 37.7 Five-Dollar Footlong sandwiches, 41.84 gallons of gasoline at AAA’s reported average national price of $4.507 per gallon, or 1,005 eggs according to April Federal Reserve economic data, every single day. Imagine the size of that omelette. Add it all up and you get an entire Macan EV in depreciation. No, really, a new base-model electric Macan starts at $82,650 including freight.
If you want a data point on the K-shaped car market, here it is. The second owner of this one-model-year-old, once-quarter-million-dollar, not-crashed, not-stolen electric super-sedan shook hands at $84,485 below sticker price. I simply couldn’t fathom living with that sort of depreciation, but then again, I’m not the target market for this thing. Give me a quarter-million to spend on cars, and I’m coming home with between two and six heavily depreciated, often needy performance cars of my youth.
So, now we know what a gently used Porsche Taycan Turbo GT is actually worth, and they’re probably only going to get cheaper from here. Keep in mind, this is effectively just one year of depreciation due to North America’s weird model year system. How soon will we see the first one of these under $100,000? Under $50,000? While 911s hold their value well, Panameras, Cayennes, and other Taycans suggest these Taycan Turbo GT models will eventually become relatively cheap. Place your guesses now.
Top graphic image: Cars & Bids
Speaking of Cars & Bids, THEY SUCK ASS. Here’s my recently posted reminder on an auction where I was the seller;
……………………………
Halfway thru my auction a brand new user posted a comment which was a lie, obviously designed to depress the bidding on the car. It was along the lines of “I know this car and it was in an accident and the axle was broken.” It was complete and total BS. C&B kept it up for hours without taking it down, refused to re-start the auction, refused to make it one of their highlighted auctions, refused to let me increase the reserve and refused to do ANYTHING to salvage the auction. It wouldn’t have cost them anything. Instead I got “Oh we still have lots of confidence your auction will turn out fine!!!!”. Total BS.
So not one of the people that bid BEFORE that comment bid again after and interest absolutely dried up. It was like hitting a brick wall. The auction came in UNDER the reserve I set (which they pressure you to keep low) and then THEY MADE UP THE DIFFERENCE so the sale would go through.
So I’ve never gone back there and I will never use it again and EVERYONE SHOULD BE AWARE THAT C&B is complete and total BS. End of rant
Wait, did you get the reserve amount you set?
Yes. When you start the auction they pressure you to keep the reserve low. After the offending comment was posted they refused to let me increase the reserve. When the auction came up short THEY made up the difference to get to the reserve to sell the car. ANY chance I had to exceed the reserve was killed by their incompetence.
Okay so they pressured you to keep the reserve low. Makes sense since they make more money when a car sells vs not.
You agreed to set that reserve number. Never ever set a reserve you wouldn’t be okay with. This was the mistake on your part. It sucks they snookered you.
Yes it’s scummy that they didn’t remove a provably defamatory claim, but they also don’t have to. Your solution is to sue that user for damages, and all the online auctions know it. It was probably a friend of the buyer posting BS to suppress the price, probably knowing CnB has a habit of paying the difference to move the car.
End of the day you agreed to sell the car at the reserve price.
I’m not debating that I agreed to the reserve number before the auction started. The point of selling your car on an auction site, I would argue, is the possibility that the car sells for more. Built into that assumption is that the resulting auction would be free from false, outside efforts designed to suppress the price.
As for suing the defamatory poster that seems implausible, as I don’t see a civil tort he committed on an incomplete auction. I do think it’s likely that he committed a criminal offense of attempted fraud. I requested that anonymous user’s contact info from C&B immediately after the post and they would not provide it.
So what’s the remedy? Suing C&B for maybe 10k? That seems questionable at best. Better, C&B should have let me start the auction over so it would be unimpacted by this BS. As I said, they refused.
End of the day… and the reason I pass this tale on, is that people know that C&B is F’ing BS, and you should absolutely be aware before you consider using it.
My read: and again I don’t know you, the car, reserve price, what it’s actually worth, or any other details. C&B absolutely screwed you, but likely in a way that’s perfectly legal and within their terms. I absolutely support you blasting your story as a cautionary tale. The major point I want people to see is “Never agree to a reserve price you aren’t comfortable with“.
That was unfortunately your primary mistake, and how they screwed you. You thought you were working with morally good actors, not a soulless business.
As for the dude saying the car was lying about the car being crashed/broken to suppress the price. It’s either defamation, by saying you’re fraudulently describing the condition of the vehicle, or outright fraud if he was intentionally trying to suppress the price so he or an accomplice could save money. The former is easier to prove than the latter, but both would likely cost you more money in court than you’ll ever get in damages.
It’s a shitty situation to be in, and absolutely a cautionary tale others need to hear.
I don’t disagree with any of that.
That interior screen mess where a shifter should be is gross. The depreciation of 80k is more of what I would have thought people would offer, 160k for this is nuts.
“The Pale Blue Metallic paint was $2,850,”
That shade of blue does not look like it’s worth $2850 to me. And the reason why these things depreciate so much is because they are overpriced to start with.
Many of these options, like the paint, add cost when new, but add little to no value on the resale market.
“That shade of blue does not look like it’s worth $2850 to me.”
It’s irrelevant what you think it’s worth.
It’s what Porsche believes they can get away with charging for it.
But it becomes relevant when I’m the prospective used car buyer with the money.
But actually even new, I wouldn’t spend a nickle on that drab colour. So they might get away charging others that much for Drab Blue, but not me.
There are some gross assumptions in this article that reek of clickbait to me, but the worst is just assuming the 6 month lease was to “game the ev tax credit”. I am not sure, but if I were an actual journalist who researched this stuff and wrote about it for a living, I’d have determined most likely a 6 month lease was not long enough to claim the credit (I think it was 24 months) and cars over a certain MSRP didn’t count. Also, the way the credits worked was different between regular personal use and corporate use.
The easy explanation is that this was used as a tax writeoff by an LLC or corporation. There are all sorts of tax “writeoffs” (insert Kramer and Seinfeld bickering about what a write off is) that we normal people don’t have access to because we aren’t business owners. Ever seen a realtor driving a Cayenne or an Urus? How about a G-wagen? It’s not because they are successful. It’s because they can write off a large portion of the car as a business expense and depreciate it too.
Well, the IRS only requires you to have owned the car for 30 days minimum to prove the intent not to resell the car. Also leased vehicles did not count for the MSRP limit nor country of origin rules, nor the income limits, so it would have qualified. So it could very well have been to game the credit to make the lease as cheap as possible. Also that does not preclude it from being a write-off as well, but I think there are limits to the amounts that can be written off and the credit would help reduce the cost after write off.
Kramer : It’s just a write off for them.
Jerry : How is it a write off?
Kramer : They just write it off…
Jerry : Write it off what?
Kramer : Jerry, all these big companies, they write off everything
Jerry : You don’t even know what a write off is!
Kramer : Do you ?
Jerry : No. I don’t.
Kramer : But they do and they are the ones writing it off.
Jerry : I wish I just had the last twenty seconds of my life back…
“that’s $84,485 in depreciation”
Not depreciation, tax writeoff. There’s a reason buyers of these things change cars like underwear. If you are in their snack bracket, there are lots of ways to take advantage of your ‘loss’ in your tax planning. At least in Canada’s tax code, but I assume the same in the US. It used to be the original price would need to be around $50k or higher, but I’m sure that gone up. These are not tricks us plebes with normi cars can take advantage of, only the rich. I’ve talked to friends who have had bad years and they just shrug their shoulders and say they can carry the loss for better times.
Well let’s actually look at the economic reasons for the depreciation. It was a 3 owner car in less than 2 years, that is a blood red flag. The expensive options are not options that carry value. More like super rare cars with weird option combinations like crank windows with an electric sunroof. Frankly I don’t think options should count in the original value. I do wonder why rich car buyers don’t store their ultra rare cars for future collectors instead of trading them in.
First World Problem.
0.01% of the First World Problem.
Only 868 more days and I can afford it !!!
Only 868? Hey everyone, look at Mr. Moneybags over here!
Oh look – yet another example of “German Luxury Depreciation”!
In other news: Researchers discover that Water is Wet!
There’s a new Ferrari coming to market!
Not that it will change the math dramatically, but do we know if the original owner actually paid sticker?
It was a lease followed by buy-out. Odds are they effectively paid sticker or more before the tax credit.
Still looks better than the Ferrari.
At $168k you could buy four of them for one Luce too!
Give me that jack and I’ll have one of the nicer appliance cars in the garage of my new house that I put 20+% on.
High end electric cars are going to depreciate like smart phones until we’ve reached a place of parity for the battery and engine tech.
A 2017 iPhone X cost $999 new. There are a few people still using one, but not very many. You can get one on ebay right now for under $100. I agree with you, electric cars are going to be like this for a bit.
I am dining alone in Rotterdam because of work trip and whatnot and I was carelessly scrolling down when I mistakenly read that a 2017 Saab Turbo X cost $999.
The Turbo X wasn’t in production in 2017 and it doesn’t cost that, but it made my heart jump a little bit. 🙂
Time travel, timey wimey space, etc. Sure. Let’s make it happen. I’ll take a 2017 Turbo X.
Or never. I was watching a car show yesterday and they made the point a 1,000 pound battery holds the same energy as 80 gallons of gas. Can’t we just agree jumping on the all EV bandwagon so early was the worst automotive prediction since steam powered cars?
Umm no? A gallon of gas is 33.7 kWh. Tesla Model 3 long range has an 80 kWh battery that weighs a little over 1000 lbs.
So, a 1000 lbs battery holds the energy of around 80/33.7 = 2.4 gallons of gas.
We can logically check this by comparing to model 3 fuel efficiency of ~130 mpge. ~310 miles range / 2.4 gallons = 129 mpge.
As TurboFarts said, you’re way off. Over an order of magnitude off. Even after you figure roughly 33% energy efficiency for ICE, you’re still off by 10x.
Gasoline is incredibly energy dense, and the most modern of batteries aren’t close pound for pound even at 99.9% energy efficiency.
I wonder if it was registered with a commercial plate, or some other means for the owner to actually claim the depreciation against their earnings. I smell some accounting practice that made this palatable to the owner.
I hate accounting.
So it will be free in 1328.868 days ?
I’ll wait, but those last 0.868 days will feel the longest.
Do you actually want to buy (84 month note) a 7-8 owner electric Porsche?
For free – hell yes
And it will probably depreciate just about as much for the second owner in a similar timeframe.
I don’t need my benchmarks of quick recalibrated (I am very happy with my very 1980’s calibration of that), but these sorts of things sure do recalibrate my benchmarks of *stupid*.
But I guess if you have “fuck all y’all” money, why not?
Also – a 5000lb *4dr sedan* with no back seat to make it a track monster? Really?Stupidity benchmark recalibrated again.
Didn’t read the column huh? It is being sold by the 3rd buyer. FLAG
Second, third, fourth, makes no difference. These things will continue to depreciate catastrophically until they are couch cushion money.
I don’t find reselling EVs (or extreme performance cars in general) to be much of a red flag. People get excited by the prospect of them, then annoyed by the reality of them and move them along. Or they find that big payment not as easy to manage as they thought it would be for something that is basically a toy.
They’ll hit a price floor eventually. Likely when the warning lights resemble a christmas tree.
So year five?
Can you explain “K-shaped car market” again? I’m trying to remember what the two axes are and whether the K is upright or lying on its back. And what makes it a K rather than just a V.
Whoa this is a family friendly website! Go look at your alphabetic smut on the dark web like a normal person.
ETA: an actually helpful source: Have U.S. consumers gone “K-shaped”? A review of the data | Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis
I see you haven’t been reading between the lines here.
MY sincerest apologies! I didn’t even know alphabet smut existed! I guess rule 26 (or 47 or w/e) has broader application than I knew!
If you took the letter H, where the center cross bar is the middle class holding everything together and steady.
Now, start squishing that middle class from one side until it disappears, leaving obscene wealth at the top, and the rest of us on the underside.
That evaporated market in the middle is what’s giving automakers trouble.
But the poorest among us in a non socialist society are actually better off in every way than the richest in the 1800s. Yes today’s unemployed actually are better off than the Vanderbilts, and every other Elon Musk type person 150 years ago.
I’ve been in the Carnegie mansion. Unemployed people today are not better off.
Two axes create battle axes as in 2 mother in laws
I always just figured they were talking about K-cars, ha ha
If I was the type of person to carry a car payment, these EVs at 2-3 years old are just spectacular depreciation things.
The EQS is my current temptation but until then 20 mpg is my target.
I’m watching the models that didn’t sell well for a commuter car, as their values have sunk.
There is a non-zero chance I’ll be in an Ioniq6 this fall.
The ICCU issue is a thing, but it has a 15 year/290k km warranty, and I can always drive my truck while it gets repaired.
Remember earlier years didn’t have fast charging
Not an issue for my use case, and it’s 2024s that I’m seeing already cheap.
Re the top shot: I now have both the Freddie King and the Jeff Beck versions of “Going Down” going thru my head. Thank you! (non-sarcastically)
Wake me when I can get one for $16k. Probably when it’s 7 years old and needs a set of tires and a cabin air filter.
So that’s what Ferrari designed the Luce to compete for a title against, the fastest depreciating car of all time
The Luce starts at 3x the price of this, and I think it’s safe to assume that 3x the depreciation rate is the low end, I could see 4-5x this rate for the Luce easily. Some poor sucker trying to get an F80 convertible allocation will inevitably option a Luce up to 800k, only to see half of that disappear in 18 months.
Ferrari said recently that they won’t make their clients buy their EVs to qualify for the halo cars.
I didn’t hear that, but in that case they’ll sell units of the Luce! Not hundreds or thousands of units, but maybe tens! Tens may be a stretch, at least a plural number of units!
…dozen, maybe more.
Massive EV depreciation doesn’t surprise me, but I’m curious why both prior owners chose to dump it so quickly.
I’ve never driven a Taycan, but by all accounts, they’re great cars.
My Mach-E GT has had about 45% depreciation in the 4 years since I bought it, but I’m keeping it for many more years to come, so the depreciation fallout really doesn’t bother me.
Based on the sticker prices for these, I think it’s just “fuck-it” money.
Like, on the low end of the Taycan price range you probably have wealthy doctors/lawyers/etc cross shopping them as an EV alternative to a mid-range Corvette or something like that. But the $250k “Turbo” is just a toy for a couple months until that millionaire wants a different toy.
Yeah, true, but I do wonder what the lease terms were for the first owner, and what the second owner paid.
Hypothetically, I wonder if there are cases of money laundering with someone buying a high-depreciation car under an LLC, dumping it for peanuts, then writing that off on taxes as a business expense. Not saying that’s the case here, but I could see that happening.
(I think) for a business you can write it off the taxes when you buy it, in which case you could buy anything for that price and there isn’t really a reason to buy something that will depreciate so quickly.
Writing off the depreciation may be another angle, but there’s rules for that so again I’m not sure it makes sense. You can write off 100% of your new “commercial” vehicle (like a decked our Silverado 3500) year one, after all.
But straight up money laundering isn’t off the table necessarily.
Oh no more rich people problems. *Inserts Clarkson’s oh no anyways gif*
Is it intentional that an article about severe EV Porsche depreciation is published directly after an article about the new expensive EV Ferrari toaster? This feels like foreshadowing.