Electric Vehicle Adoption Behavior and Vehicle Transaction Decision: Estimating an Integrated Choice Model with Latent Variables on a Retrospective Vehicle Survey

Electric vehicles (EVs) promise a sustainable solution to mitigating negative emission externalities of transportation systems caused by fossil-fueled conventional vehicles (CVs). While recent developments in battery technology and charging infrastructure can help evolve the niche market of EVs into the mass market, EVs are yet to be widely adopted by the public. This calls for an in-depth understanding of public adoption behavior of EVs as one dimension of vehicle decision making, which itself may be intertwined with other vehicle decision-making dimensions, especially vehicle transaction. This study presents an integrated choice model with latent variables (ICLV) to investigate households’—as a decision-making unit—decisions on vehicle transaction type (i.e., no transaction, sell, add, and trade) and vehicle fuel type (i.e., CVs and all EV types, including hybrid EV, plug-in hybrid EV, and battery EV) choice. To analyze the ICLV model empirically, one of the first revealed preferences national vehicle survey involving CVs and all EV types was conducted, which retrospectively inquired about 1,691 American households’ dynamics of vehicle decision making and demographic attributes over a 10-year period as well as their attitudes/preferences. The model estimation results highlight that EV adoption and vehicle transaction choice is influenced mainly by (1) the dynamics of household demographic attributes and (2) four latent constructs explaining attentiveness to vehicle attributes, social influence, environmental consciousness, and technology savviness. Notably, EV adoption promotion policies are found to be likely most effective on socially influenced individuals, who tend to consider advertisement and social trend more when making vehicle decisions.