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Man's $160,000 Porsche Taycan is now 'worthless' as dealership refuses to take it back
A man who spent $160,000 on a Porsche Taycan tried to trade it in for a used 911 and was told the dealership did not even want it back.
Lee Alexander Davey, a UK YouTuber who posts as The MacMaster, has been documenting his financial nightmare with the electric Porsche for months.
After finally deciding he had had enough, he took the car to be valued and discovered what many EV owners are now finding out the hard way.
"I'm basically left with a car that's worthless," he said. "Even the dealership does not want this car back."
The valuations
He tried everywhere.
Porsche offered him around $59,000.
WeBuyAnyCar came in at roughly $53,000.
CarWow could not do better than $35,000.
The Porsche dealership he originally bought it from valued it at around $54,000 but then told him they were no longer accepting used Taycans as trade-ins.
They did not want the car at any price.
So a car he paid $160,000 for is now worth somewhere between $35,000 and $59,000 depending on who is looking at it, and the place that sold it to him will not take it back.
"Yet again, electric cars are disposable," he said.
"I just want rid."
Why it has lost so much value
This is not a problem with him. It is a Taycan problem, and increasingly it is an EV problem across the board.
The Taycan had a strong launch.
Sales were high, reviews were positive, and it became the first electric car to star in a Hollywood car chase when it appeared in Den of Thieves 2. It also set multiple lap records at the Nürburgring.
Then the resale numbers started coming in and everything changed.
Taycan deliveries dropped 49% from 2023 to 2024, falling from over 40,000 to around 20,800. In 2025, the number dropped again to 16,339. Fewer people want the car new. Even fewer want it used.
The reason is simple.
Electric vehicle technology moves fast enough that a three-year-old EV feels outdated in a way that a three-year-old petrol car does not.
Battery range improves. Charging speeds improve. Software changes.
Buyers looking at a used Taycan are comparing it to newer models that do everything better, and they are choosing the newer ones or skipping EVs altogether.
That leaves owners of early models holding cars that depreciate faster than almost anything else on the road.
Why Porsche has a bigger problem
Porsche's operating profitability dropped over 90% year-on-year from 2024 to 2025.
The main reason is that electric vehicles are significantly more expensive to manufacture than internal combustion equivalents, and as sales decline, the cost of making them does not decline with it.
The brand is caught between two things.
Government mandates pushing them toward electrification, and a customer base that is increasingly telling them, through the only metric that matters, that they do not want what is being offered.
Davey's story is one man and one car, but the 90% profitability drop and the 60% sales decline over two years tell you this is not an isolated experience - it is a trend, and Porsche has not figured out how to reverse it yet.
What Davey plans to do
He wants a used 911. Petrol engine, no battery, no range anxiety and no dealership telling him his car is not wanted.
Whether he manages to offload the Taycan at all, and for how much, will presumably be the subject of another video.