Assessment of the betterness of a battery electric vehicle: A multi-criteria decision-making approach

Abstract

Despite the advantages and benefits of a battery electric vehicle, its adoption rate remains low. Previous studies have explored factors that influence the adoption of electric vehicles. However, studies investigating whether an electric car outperforms a gasoline car are still limited. Therefore, this study aims to assess the betterness of an electric vehicle compared with a gasoline vehicle in helping customers perform their jobs to be done. A multi-criteria decision-making approach using the analytic hierarchy process is built on two main criteria, namely, customer pains and customer gains, where customer pains are divided into cost pains and non-cost pains, and customer gains are divided into functional gains and emotional gains. Using the most affordable battery electric vehicle in the Indonesian market, interviewees who live in the greater Jakarta and drive to work were invited to perform the pairwise comparison processes. The finding of this study shows that with respect to helping customers perform their jobs to be done, a battery electric vehicle is equally to moderately worse than a gasoline vehicle with a worse score of 0.5946 compared with a better score of 0.4054. This finding comes from interviewees who prioritize customer gains with a priority score of 0.6993 over customer pains with a priority score of 0.3007. Considering that the analytic hierarchy process allows a small number of interviewees, the result obtained should be limited as an early prediction about the betterness of an electric car compared with a gasoline car from a certain group of persons.