What is actually on the table
According to the announcement, this is the first edition with three vehicle prizes across two independently drawn raffles:
- Luxury Raffle — $250 per ticket, capped at 5,000 tickets. Grand prize: any fully electric make and model, or a combination of two, with a combined value of up to $120,000. Second prize: one EV worth up to $35,000.
- Mini Raffle — $100 per ticket, capped at 4,000 tickets. One EV up to $50,000, specced by you.
- Taxes on the vehicle prizes are paid by Climate XChange, not by the winner.
- Early-bird bonus — every Luxury ticket bought by 11:59 pm ET on 29 October 2026 also enters a $10,000 drawing, without leaving the main draw.
Our maths: the two tiers are the same deal
Run the numbers at a full sell-out. The Luxury Raffle raises 5,000 × $250 = $1,250,000. Against that sit $155,000 of car prizes plus a $10,000 early-bird draw — up to $165,000, or 13.2% of gross. Per ticket, that is an expected car value of about $31 for a $250 stake, before you count any early-bird equity.
The Mini Raffle: 4,000 × $100 = $400,000 raised against a $50,000 prize — 12.5% of gross, or $12.50 per ticket.
So the Luxury tier does not buy better value per dollar; it buys bigger prizes and a better shot at driving away in something. Odds at full sell-out are 1 in 2,500 for either Luxury car prize (two prizes, 5,000 tickets) versus 1 in 4,000 in the Mini. Per dollar spent, the Mini actually gives you slightly more expected wins — but each win tops out at $50,000 instead of an average of $77,500 across the Luxury prizes. The two figures reconcile to the same ~12.5%.
One caveat worth stating: those are maximum-revenue figures. The prize values are fixed, the ticket count is not. If a raffle undersells, odds improve and expected value per ticket rises. If it sells out, the numbers above are locked in — a useful reminder that you cannot assume better-than-advertised odds.
The tax line is the part that matters
In the United States a $120,000 prize is taxable income: federal withholding on prizes runs at 24%, top brackets reach 37%, and states add their own slice. Depending on the winner's bracket and state of residence, the tax bill on the top prize can land somewhere in the $30,000–45,000 range — which is exactly what Climate XChange is absorbing. That is the single biggest real-world sweetener in this raffle.
For a European reader it also illustrates how differently the two markets work. In Czechia, winnings from a licensed lottery are not taxed in the winner's hands at all, so a "we pay the taxes" clause would be meaningless here. Charity raffles in the EU are also licensed member state by member state, which is why nobody runs a pan-European draw at this level. Eligibility for this one is governed by state rules — check the official terms before buying from outside the eligible jurisdictions, because an ineligible entry is normally void.
What $120,000 actually buys in Europe
At roughly $1.17 per euro, the top prize is worth about €103,000. That is one serious premium EV and not much more: the Porsche Macan Electric starts at around €80,000 in Germany, while an i7 is well past €130,000 and would blow the cap by itself. The "two cars" option only works in the mid-market — two Model 3-class EVs at roughly €40,000–45,000 each, or one of those plus a compact crossover, all comfortably inside $120,000.
For scale, the BYD Denza Z9GT that arrived in Thailand at $89,870 would swallow three-quarters of the grand prize in a single car. The $50,000 Mini prize is about €43,000.
Practical takeaway
Read the raffle as a donation with a lottery attached, not as a purchase. At a full sell-out, roughly 87% of Luxury ticket revenue stays with the nonprofit — the opposite of a state lottery, which typically returns about half to two-thirds of stakes to players. The Electrek post carrying the news includes an FTC affiliate disclosure; we have no affiliation with the raffle.
If you want the energy equivalent of a ticket, $250 is about €214. At €0.50/kWh — a realistic DC fast-charging rate across much of the EU, and the kind of figure our supercharger database of 483 locations is built to compare — that is 428 kWh, or roughly 2,400 km in an 18 kWh/100 km EV. You can run your own numbers in the charging cost calculator, check what the market actually offers in our EV catalog, and see where electricity is cheapest on the cheapest-superchargers list. We applied the same per-unit arithmetic to Isuzu's 7-minute battery-swap trial in Thailand, and the lesson is the same: headline prizes are easy, cost per unit is what tells you whether the deal is good.
For US-based readers in eligible states, the sensible play is the Mini Raffle if you want more chances per dollar and the Luxury tier if you want the bigger prize — and buying before 29 October if you are already going in on the Luxury draw. Everyone else: the maths says buy the car you want outright, and put the $250 toward the electricity.
