Dynamic Household Vehicle Decision Modeling Considering Plug-In Electric Vehicles

Abstract

Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) offer alternatives to traditional vehicles that rely on petroleum-based fuels. While PEV customers can enjoy significant reductions in fuel costs, they incur a larger capital cost than users of traditional vehicles because PEV technology is still maturing. Therefore, consumers adopting PEVs face a trade-off between fuel cost savings with environmental benefits and extra capital cost. It is thus crucial for policy makers and PEV manufacturers to understand people’s vehicle decision-making process while considering their socio-economic and travel pattern characteristics as well as the built-environment factors. This paper presents a connected, two-stage, dynamic model of PEV adoption and vehicle-transaction decision-making. Two connected nested logit (NL) models are estimated. The upper level is a two-level NL model to predict choice of vehicle type between four fuel types: gasoline, diesel, hybrid gasoline–electric, and PEV. The lower level is an NL model of vehicle-transaction choice which accommodates four transaction decisions of buy, trade, dispose, and do nothing, while accounting for the log-sum from the vehicle-type choice model, and is estimated using two waves of a panel data set. We find that households with higher levels of income and education are more likely to adopt a PEV. We also found that primarily decision makers take into account the accessibility to charging stations as a critical factor in choosing PEVs.

Battery Electric Vehicle adoption in regions without strong policies

“…Its effect on EV adoption is found positive in all studies reviewed (e.g. Axsen et al, 2016;Bailey et al, 2015;Nazari et al, 2018), except for one recent RP study on PEVs in California (Javid and Nejat, 2017). In places with a high proportion of tenants, e.g.…”

“…More cars in the household make EVs more acceptable (Tamor et al, 2015;Jakobsson et al, 2016;Karlsson, 2017) as an ICEV can overcome range anxiety and long recharging times. In RP studies (on PEVs) findings are mixed: while it matters in Canada (Axsen et al, 2016), this is not the case in the US (Javid and Nejat, 2017;Nazari et al, 2018). Car sharing usage, especially the usage of electric car sharing, was found to be positively influencing the perceived usefulness of EVs (Schlüter and Weyer, 2019),, notably in an RP study (Javid and Nejat, 2017).…”

“…Studies on EV uptake, as well as on buycotts, a movement of political consumerism and ethical consumption (Stolle et al, 2005;Jacobsen and Dulsrud, 2007;Hoffmann et al, 2018), found several socio-demographic factors to increase uptake probabilities. Many RP studies on PEVs (Axsen and Kurani, 2013;Tal et al, 2014;Axsen et al, 2016;Nazari et al, 2018;Lee et al, 2019), SP studies on BEVs (Hidrue et al, 2011;Plötz et al, 2014;Zhuge and Shao, 2019), as well as most notable RP studies on BEVs (Almeida Neves et al, 2019), have found higher income and higher education to increase the likelihood of EV adoption. However, in two RP PEV-studies at the national level, educational achievements and income were found to be insignificant (Sierzchula et al, 2014;Li et al, 2017b).…”

“…Similarly, owning a complete public transport (local trains, trams, ferries and busses as well as long-distance trains) subscription is linked to more openness towards new mobility tools (Guidon et al, 2019;Meyer de Freitas et al, 2019) and may play an analogous role in BEV adoption decisions. Lastly, some RP studies (Javid and Nejat, 2017;Nazari et al, 2018;Thøgersen and Ebsen, 2019) show that people in smaller households are more likely to adopt an EV. In SP studies (with some RP cases from European countries) there are result in the same direction (Priessner et al, 2018) as well as the opposite direction, that mainly families adopt BEVs (Plötz et al, 2014).…”

“…While other countries, such as Australia (Webb et al, 2019), also have no strong EV policies, we opted for a country without manufacturer presence to minimise contamination. Lastly, many other areas feature large proportions of home-owners, who are more likely to adopt EVs (Bailey et al, 2015;Axsen et al, 2016;Javid and Nejat, 2017;Nazari et al, 2018), while homeownership is rather uncommon in our chosen area of study.…”