Why I’m Trying To Convince My Wife To Buy The Toyota bZ4X, One Of The ‘Worst’ Modern EVs

My wife, a longtime Lexus fan, wants a bigger, newer car that’s electric, but there’s a problem: There are no 3-row EVs available from Toyota. So “larger” is going to have to wait; that means, if we want to go electric, we’ve got two “bad” choices: the Lexus RZ or the Toyota bZ4X. I’ve already written all about how we are considering going with the former, but now I’m pushing for the latter. Here’s why.

The three-row EV SUV space is bleak. You can buy a tiny Model Y, you can snag a Kia/Hyundai, or you can spend lots of money on a Rivian, Cadillac, Mercedes or Lucid. Choices from Ford, Toyota, Stellantis, VW, and on and on are non-existent. This is a shame because there are lots of families who want extra space and who want to go electric; we’re one of them.

I’m never going to get my wife (Elise, not her real name) out of a Toyota product given how happy she’s been with her family’s Lexuses, and frankly, I’d be a hypocrite to even suggest a different brand given that I own one of every Jeep built in 1992. So Elise and I have been looking at RZs.

If you look at reviews of the Lexus RZ, you’ll see that they’re not particularly positive. I reviewed the car myself and my headline was: Why A New Lexus RZ Is A Terrible Deal But A Used One (Or Lease) Is A Great Deal. The car used to cost almost $60 grand new and struggled to travel 200 miles on a charge; that alone led reviewers to basically call it a steaming heap in much the same way that they called my BMW i3 a steaming heap when it was new.

But a car’s reputation can be repaired once it has hit the used market, as we’ve seen with the i3. And that brings me to the bZ4x, because I’m really tempted by it:

When the “bizzforx” first hit the market, reviewers weren’t thrilled. My favorite tech journalist in the game, Frank Markus, wrote the headline “2023 Toyota bZ4X FWD Limited First Test: The Last Compliance Car?…Toyota grudgingly relents to producing a mainstream electric vehicle. We grudgingly review it.” Here’s what he concludes in the Motor Trend article:

If you’re a lifelong Toyota devotee ready to make your household’s second car an EV, and your body type affords you a view of the instruments, then sure, go for it. Everyone else will probably be better served by any of the more thoroughly optimized EVs offered by Tesla, Hyundai, Kia, and others. Under new corporate leadership, we expect the 10 new fully electric vehicles Toyota has promised to launch by 2026 on an all-new architecture to rectify these various shortcomings. And at a bare minimum, we all expect to be able to reach the wheel and see the instruments.

The biggest issue is the lack of range and the slow charging speed. But, given that Elise and I can charge at home, and given how little Elise drives daily, 200 miles is plenty. More importantly, her 2017 Lexus RX is worth over $20,000 (the local Lexus dealer seems eager to buy it), and she can snag a six-year-newer electric bZ4X for only $15,300!:

This blew me away. These things are trading for under $20 grand all day, with higher-milage ones down in the mid-teens! Sure, the silver car above has 100,000 miles on the clock, but that’s nothing for an EV. And more importantly, with the California EV rebate and our power company rebate, this $15,300 would actually cost us $12,550 plus tax. That’s dirt.

And then let’s talk about the running cost delta. My wife’s 2017 Lexus RX, shown below, gets about 17 mpg in town. I’d guess that the bZ4x will do about 3.5 miles per kWh given all the city driving Elise does. A kWh costs us probably 25 cents if we charge at night.

Let’s assume 8,000 miles driven annually and current $5/gallon gas prices. The RX, at 17 mpg, will cost us about $2,350 in fuel annually. The bZ4x? Just $571. That’s a delta of $1,779 per year!

That means that, in just 7 years, the bZ4x will literally pay for itself when compared with the Lexus. Obviously, there’s insurance costs, but given we’d only drop $12,550 on the vehicle, we’d probably not bother with the full coverage that’s on the Lexus and drop it down to the bare-bone minimum. We’d also save in maintenance costs (oil changes, brake pad changes, etc.), and it turns out bZ4X tires last a good while, too, which is never a guarantee with a heavy, regenerative braking-equipped EV.

On paper, this seem like a no-brainer. We sell the RX for $20 big ones, buy the much-maligned-when-new bZ for $12,550, profit the $7000 after taxes, then spend the next 7 years in a modern car with Carplay and various new safety features, saving the price of the bZ in running costs all the while. By then, Toyota’s/Lexus’s 3-row SUVs will have hit the market and depreciated; we can ditch the bZ and buy one of those.

It’s genius! Of course, Elise won’t go for it because she’s a Lexus fangirl, and frankly, spending another $10 grand on an RZ that’s basically the same car is hard for me to justify given that it means there’s more to lose on depreciation in the next 7 years (the biggest risk with buying an EV), but man is it tempting. One of the “worst” modern EVs is a heck of a used-car deal — a three year-old Toyota SUV for $12,500.

That’s pretty much the story of used EVs. They’re simply amazing deals when you compare their performance to similarly priced gas cars, but because they’re not right car for everyone, those who can charge at home or work stand to gain.