RIEB Seminar

10:40am-12:10pm

Topics

Perception towards Electric Vehicles and its Impact on Consumers' Preference

Speaker

Milad GHASRI (School of Engineering and Information Technology, The University of New South Wales)

Abstruct

Relative advantage, or the degree to which a new technology is perceived to be better than an existing technology which is being replaced, has a significant impact on individuals' decisions on when, how and to what extent to adopt. In this study, an integrated choice and latent variable model is used to measure the perceived advantage in electric vehicles over the conventional internal combustion engine vehicles. The analysed data is obtained from a stated preference survey including 1,076 residents in New South Wales, Australia. According to the results, the latent component of the model disentangles the perceived advantages across three dimensions of vehicle design, impact on the environment, and safety. These latent variables are interacted with price, driving range and body type, respectively, to capture the impact of perception on preference. The developed model is then used to examine different scenarios, in order to explore the effectiveness of several support schemes. The results show higher probability of adopting electric vehicles for generation Y, compared to generation X and Z. Generation Y is found to be the least sensitive cohort to purchase price, and generation X to be the most sensitive cohort to this attribute. People are more sensitive to incentives for the initial price compared to ongoing incentives for operating costs. Also, offering financial incentives to consumers as a rebate on the purchase price is more effective than allocating the same incentive to manufactories to reduce the purchase price.