Dynamic consumer preferences for electric vehicles in China: A longitudinal approach

Sustainable innovations such as electric vehicles (EVs) are important means to address global environmental and energy sustainability challenges – one of the key agendas of current strategic government policy. Although EVs have gradually penetrated the market, existing research on consumer preferences for EVs is mostly based on cross-sectional analysis, without sufficient attention devoted to consumer preference changes over time. To fill this gap, this study proposes a longitudinal approach to extend the EV adoption research. Specifically, this study illustrates the value of studying consumer preferences for EVs from a dynamic perspective and focuses on changes in preference heterogeneity across different marketA segments over time. This study conducts three waves of stated preference experiments from 2017 to 2019 from a same group of respondents. The mixed logit analysis shows that, over these three years, Chinese consumers have become less sensitive to running cost but have been consistently valuing home charging capability and prioritized licensing for EVs. Furthermore, the perceived importance of the density of fast charging stations and overall preferences for EVs fluctuated over this period. Further analysis on preference heterogeneity finds that consumers in small cities were developing stronger preferences for battery EVs in 2018 and 2019 than in the base year of 2017, while those living in midsized and big cities did not present the preference change for battery EVs over the same period. Our study provides important managerial and policy implications for the diffusion of EVs, in particular with respect to specific insights obtained by taking a dynamic perspective to study consumer preferences for EVs.