Used electric vehicles are poised for a banner year in 2026.

More than 300,000 electric vehicle users are expected to end their leases this year, according to car dealer platform CDK Global. That’s a 200% uptick in options for the used vehicle marketplace compared to last year.

Plug is cashing in. The used electric vehicle marketplace ba d in Santa Monica announced in early February that it raised $20 million in series A funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with additional participation from Galvanize Climate Solutions and repeat investors Autotech Ventures, Leap Forward Ventures and Renn Global.

“The growth of the used EV market is driving a fundamental shift in how vehicles are valued and transacted,” Justin Overdorff, a partner at Lightspeed, said in a statement.

Problem with used EV marketplaces

Jimmy Douglas, founder and chief executive of Plug, has long been entrenched in the world of used EVs. Douglas led Tesla Inc.’s used car business in North America during his five-year tenure at the company. At the time, it was the largest used electric vehicle operation in the world, and Douglas was beginning to see that selling used EVs was nothing like selling other used cars.

“I was already seeing a highly inefficient market in the broader car dealership community emerging,” Douglas said.

Indeed, early efforts to sell pre-owned electric vehicles were largely flying blind, Douglas said. Because used electric vehicles were few and far between, they weren’t transacting at a high enough volume for dealers to determine price based on the quality of car sensors, its battery-pack capacity or its access to charging networks, he said. In the absence of that data, dealers used combustion metrics like checking the mileage and condition of a vehicle in order to determine its value, rather than assessing the product’s software.

That lack of data makes buyers wary of purchasing, according to electric vehicle data insights firm Recurrent. In a 2025 survey of 250 EV shoppers, around 70% said they would prefer dealers who provided data specific to hybrids on their pages.

“Many out-of-the-box dealership website templates were designed for gas vehicles and lack dedicated fields for EV details like battery, range, or charging speeds,” Andrew Garberson, head of growth and research at Recurrent, said in a statement. “Even when dealers want to educate shoppers, it’s difficult to find consistent, model-specific EV data, especially across multiple makes, model years, and trims. As a result, most EV listings look identical to gas listings, missing the chance to answer key buyer questions.”

Plug’s platform, which is built for electric vehicles specifically, connects to cars and evaluates them based on fluctuating market signals, the health of its battery and other proprietary insights gleaned by the company’s software.

“They are increasingly becoming a computer on wheels, assets that are defined by their computer hardware and software capabilities, the durability and capacity of their high voltage battery pack and other important daily life factors…” Douglas said. “Which cannot be judged necessarily by how far they’ve been driven.”

Used EVs are sitting at an interesting nexus. Thousands of electric vehicles are expected to come off lease in 2026, making them viable used car options. At the same time, several new companies have entered the market to compete with electric automakers like Tesla by creating low-cost hybrids.

“I’m not an EV extremist that thinks that it’s the best tool for every single job and use case, nor do I try to shove them down the throats of the people who don’t want them,” Douglas said. “But I do believe that a path to an electrified future is critical for many reasons. And so I decided to embark on this outside of Tesla because I felt that the piece where I can have the biggest impact is normalizing and bringing health to the secondary market.”