Public Preference for Electric Vehicle Incentive Policies in China: A Conjoint Analysis

In order to mitigate energy consumption and greenhouse gas emission in the transportation sector, countries around the world have generally adopted electric vehicles (EVs) as a new development direction of the automobile industry. Although the Chinese government has issued a series of incentive policies to promote EVs, the ownership of EVs is still insufficient due to low public purchasing enthusiasm. Thus, to better realize the promotion goal of EVs, public preference for EV incentive policies is worth investigating. Based on a large sample survey (N = 1039), this study investigated public preference for various incentive policies by using the conjoint analysis method. The results suggest that less than one third of consumers have a better understanding of the incentive policies, while more than half of the consumers know little about these policies. For consumers, the relative importance of different policy categories is ranked as follows: charging incentive policies, driving incentive policies, vehicle registering incentive policies, and purchasing incentive policies. As for different socio-demographic groups, consumers aged 26–30 years, with a monthly income higher than RMB 20,000, with high school, special secondary school, and masters (or above) educational levels regarded the relative importance of driving incentive policies as the highest; consumers from two-member families ranked purchasing incentive policies as the first one; consumers with a monthly income of RMB 15,001–20,000 and those from three-member families place registering incentive policies first; other consumers put charging incentive policies first. Based on the above results, this paper offers policy recommendations for improving consumer knowledge level of incentive policies as well as full consideration of their policy demands.