Electric vehicles and consumer choices

F. Mandys

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews, 2021, vol. 142, issue C

Abstract: Electric vehicles (EVs) have many attractive features compared to conventional vehicles (CVs). Their main advantage lies in their significant economic benefits due to the much higher fuel efficiency, and substantial environmental benefit of lower greenhouse gas emissions. However, the market share of EVs in the UK remains low and their benefits will not be realized unless the government and the manufacturers can gain crucial information, necessary to effectively support and speed up the adoption of EVs. Such contemporary information for the UK is missing in the literature, and this study aims to fill the gap. Therefore, a stated preferences UK dataset is used, and a discrete choice mode is applied, using an adaptive Lasso methodology, binomial logit and ordered logit regressions. The main goals include: finding the characteristics of potential early adopters of EVs in the UK, the vehicle attributes that they consider important for their buying decisions, and the key barriers that slow EV adoption. The results suggest that the propensity of being a potential EV early adopter increases with youth, education, being a student, living in the more southern parts of UK, being married and, to a lesser extent, income. Additionally, purchase cost, performance, maximum range and environmental friendliness are found to be important vehicle attributes for the potential buyers. Furthermore, two key barriers to wide EV adoption are identified – high purchase cost and low maximum range of the vehicle.

Keywords: Alternative fuel vehicle; Consumer behavior; Discrete choice model; Lasso; Socio-technical barrier; Early adopter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021
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Citations: View citations in EconPapers (21)

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DOI: 10.1016/j.rser.2021.110874

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