An empirical case study on Indian consumers' sentiment towards electric vehicles: A big data analytics approach

Abstract

Today, climate change due to global warming is a significant concern to all of us. India's rate of greenhouse gas emissions is increasing day by day, placing India in the top ten emitters in the world. Air pollution is one of the significant contributors to the greenhouse effect. Transportation contributes about 10% of the air pollution in India. The Indian government is taking steps to reduce air pollution by encouraging the use of electric vehicles. But, success depends on consumer's sentiment, perception and understanding towards Electric Vehicles (EV). This case study tried to capture the feeling, attitude, and emotions of Indian consumers' towards electric vehicles. The main objective of this study was to extract opinions valuable to prospective buyers (to know what is best for them), marketers (for determining what features should be advertised) and manufacturers (for deciding what features should be improved) using Deep Learning techniques (e.g Doc2Vec Algorithm, Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)). Due to the very nature of social media data, big data platform was chosen to analyze the sentiment towards EV. Deep Learning based techniques were preferred over traditional machine learning algorithms (Support Vector Machine, Logistic regression and Decision tree, etc.) due to its superior text mining capabilities. Two years data (2016 to 2018) were collected from different social media platform for this case study. The results showed the efficiency of deep learning algorithms and found CNN yield better results in-compare to others. The proposed optimal model will help consumers, designers and manufacturers in their decision-making capabilities to choose, design and manufacture EV.