Plus, you'll have to also pay the interest on that loan, and good credit is a must to avoid being stabbed in the back with interest rates with car lenders.
EDIT: This does mean that a used car market for EVs is quite viable though.
So how do the resale values for 5 year old EVs with 60k miles on the clock (or more accurately on the battery) look?
When we bought the little petrol car the salesman saw us looking at the EV and there was a brief discussion, back then he said that resale values for cars like that were "a complete unknown" ...
The little car has ~50,000km (~31,000 miles) on it so far, and even if its resale value after 5 years were to be zero I guess the most I've lost is the full purchase price, €10k.
How does that work with a EV that not only costs much more up front but probably loses fractional value faster, too?
EDIT: just checked the current prices, the latest model is (in round figures) €15,000 and as an EV it's €25,000. The trade seems to want to describe the latter as "affordable" but to me it's simply an extra €10k up front that I don't have right now. The range of the EV is basically 1/3 that of the petrol version.
Median lifetime is 19 years. At 12,000 miles/year that's 228,000 miles.
For a vast majority of car buyers, there are only two prices they will care about. How much it costs when they get it, and how much they get when they sell it.
And to the original point, a low TCO will have no impact one someone's ability to buy the car in the first place.
And if you include a middleman, like a dealer for a trade-in, they won't ever pay for gas or maintenance, so they're even less inclined to factor the remaining TCO into the price.
The price the buyer is willing to buy at is directly related to the costs he is going to incur operating the vehicle.