In a used-car value study from iSeeCars, a 10-year-old Nissan Leaf averaged $5,675 in list price and was expected to have 5.1 years of life left, which works out to $1,108 for each remaining year. That was the lowest price per remaining year among the 25 models on the study’s 10-year list, and the lowest sticker price on it as well. The company is a commercial car-research and listing site, so the figures are its own analysis and not a government or manufacturer finding. The result made the Leaf the first electric vehicle to lead the study’s overall rankings.
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The ranking is a commercial analysis of listing data, so its numbers describe model averages and not any single car.
How iSeeCars turns a price into a cost per remaining year
The method is simple enough to check by hand. According to the iSeeCars best-used-cars study, the company analyzed list prices for more than 900,000 used cars that were five or ten years old and sold between July and December 2025. It then divided each model’s average list price by the number of years the model is expected to keep running, taking that expected lifespan from odometer readings on almost 400 million used cars gathered for its separate longest-lasting-cars work.
Segment lists keep only models whose price per remaining year falls below the segment average, and low-volume vehicles and sports cars were left out. The page does not spell out how the lifespan estimate is built beyond pointing to that earlier longevity study, which is a limit worth keeping in mind when reading any single result.
The Leaf’s $1,108 against the 10-year average
The all-model benchmark for a 10-year-old vehicle in the study is an average list price of $14,195, a remaining lifespan of 5.9 years and a cost of $2,415 per remaining year. The Leaf’s $1,108 is about 0.46 times that figure. Its price is well under half the typical 10-year-old car’s, while its expected remaining life of 5.1 years is only 0.8 years shorter than the average, and that gap in price is what drives the ranking. Put another way, a buyer paying the 10-year average would be spending $14,195 for roughly 0.8 more years of expected life than the Leaf offers, and the extra $8,520 in price is what the cost-per-year measure penalizes.
Karl Brauer, iSeeCars’ executive analyst, noted in the study that even 10-year-old used cars average more than $14,000. Against that backdrop a sub-$6,000 car looks like an outlier, and the arithmetic explains why a short-lived but very cheap car can beat a longer-lived but pricier one.
The Model S and the longevity tradeoff
The same study carries a caution that Brauer put plainly. He said buyers need to go into a Leaf purchase knowing it is not a long-term solution, and he pointed buyers who want a longer-term electric option toward the Tesla Model S. In the 10-year table the Model S sits eighth at $1,642 per remaining year, with an average list price of $16,874 and an expected 10.3 years left.
Those two entries show the tradeoff built into the metric. The Leaf is cheaper per year because it costs so little to buy, and the Model S is competitive because it is expected to run so long. Other low-priced entries make the same point: the Nissan Versa averages $7,403 with 4.7 years left, or $1,575 a year, and the Hyundai Accent averages $7,661 with the same 4.7 years, or $1,647 a year.
What a model average cannot tell a buyer
A cost per remaining year is a ranking device, not a warranty. It blends every example of a model sold in the period, so a Leaf with a healthy battery and a Leaf with a tired one are averaged together. Independent buyer’s guides, such as InsideEVs’ used Leaf guide and the Recurrent Nissan Leaf guide, are the better place to look for model-year specifics that a study at this scale cannot supply.
The lifespan side of the equation also comes from a separate body of iSeeCars work. Coverage of that research, including a report on which vehicles are most likely to reach 250,000 miles and a summary of the Toyota result, shows the company frames longevity as a probability across a model’s fleet. That framing is why the 5.1 years attached to the Leaf is an expectation drawn from many cars and not a promise about one.
For a shopper, the practical reading is narrow. The study says that among 10-year-old models listed in the second half of 2025, the Leaf cost the least for each year of expected life, and it says the same study’s authors consider the car a short-horizon purchase. An inspection of the individual car, including its battery condition, still decides whether that average applies.
This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.
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