u/RollingCliff

I've never owned an EV before, but have been quite impressed with the IONIQs when I've been in them as a passenger.

I've been keeping an eye on the one in the photo. It's been on the lot for a while (not much interest in these?) and the dealer has dropped the price to the point where it's a fair bit below the Carsales valuation (~$25k).

Are these older IONIQs still worth it if they don't have many kilometres? They are so much cheaper than the newer ones. Obviously the battery is much smaller, but I would be using it as a runabout, not for long trips.

Is there any way to assess whether the battery is still in good condition?

To get a sample of cars currently on the road in Australia, I pulled a snapshot of over 190k active Australian car listings and grouped them by assembly country based on VIN.

Here's what I found interesting:

• Quite a few Japanese manufacturers manufacture a large portion of their Australian vehicles in Thailand. 97% of Isuzu listings were manufactured there.
• More Volvo listings were made in China than Sweden (Geely influence?)
• Most Ford listings were made in Thailand (particularly Rangers, except for PHEV Rangers which come from South Africa)
• 11% of Kia listings were manufactured in Mexico (likely the new K4s)
• Almost 9% of Jeep listings were manufactured in India
• 12% of Nissan listings were made in the UK
• Most European and Chinese manufacturers keep assembly in their home country

Note that assembly country was determined from the WMI indicated by the VIN, not a definitive record of the individual vehicle’s final assembly plant. It’s still a useful broad view of where the cars currently on the market originated.

It's also worth noting that this data is captured from a snapshot of new and used cars. The data will look different if you look at new cars alone.

What stood out most to you from this data?

I’ve just made a free tool that checks whether a VIN appears in Australian government vehicle recall data.

The government publishes recall notices but finding out which notices actually apply to your vehicle is a bit awkward. Recalls are often specific to particular variants and filtering on the government site is limited.

This tool will match your VIN with these notices. For some vehicle makes, it also attempts to check with the manufacturer whether the recall is still outstanding or has been repaired.

It’s still a work in progress, so take the results with a grain of salt. If anything shows up, I’d still confirm directly with the manufacturer or dealer.

Posting here mainly because I thought it might be useful for people checking used cars and wondering whether there’s outstanding recall notices on a particular vehicle.

Recall lookup tool: https://carcrunch.io/tools/recall-check

Source data: https://www.vehiclerecalls.gov.au/recalls/browse-all-recalls

I often hear about the “Toyota tax”, so I wanted to see how obvious it actually is in the used market.

I pulled a snapshot of active Australian used car listings for vehicles with model years from 2020-2025 and compared RAV4s with the usual medium SUV alternatives: CX-5, Sportage, Tucson, X-Trail, Outlander, Forester, CR-V, etc.

Here’s the median price for each of the models I compared:

• Toyota RAV4 - $42,000 (1,718 listings)
• Honda CR-V - $35,000 (379 listings)
• Kia Sportage - $34,000 (813 listings)
• Volkswagen Tiguan - $34,000 (426 listings)
• Hyundai Tucson - $33,500 (1,068 listings)
• Mitsubishi Outlander - $33,000 (1,053 listings)
• Mazda CX-5 - $32,000 (802 listings)
• Subaru Forester - $31,900 (705 listings)
• Nissan X-TRAIL - $31,000 (1,004 listings)

The RAV4 is typically 20-35% higher than other cars in the same category.

I was surprised with how close the pricing was for the non-RAV4 cars. Interestingly, the Tiguan actually starts off the closest to the RAV4 at low kilometres, but depreciates much faster.

The data above isn't broken down by hybrid vs non-hybrid, but even when I do that, the RAV4 still clearly comes out on top.

What do you think? Does the RAV4 justify the higher pricing? Or is it just the Toyota tax?

Source: CarCrunch.io public listing data, active car listings as at 7 July 2026

If you see a car listed with a lot of recent price drops, does that mean that they are eager to sell and that you can likely negotiate the price down further? Or are they close to the lowest they would be willing to sell for?