Differences in consumers’ product attribute preferences and willingness to pay for new energy vehicles: A comparison between the license plate- and non-license plate-restricted cities in China

Abstract

After dividing China’s new energy vehicle (NEV) pilot promotion cities into license plate- and non-license plate-restricted cities, the choice of experiment and latent class model were used in this study to classify the consumers in the two kinds of cities from the technical, economical, and convenience dimensions. Then the differences in consumers’ product attribute preferences and willingness to pay (WTP) for NEVs in different cities and different types were compared and the impact of consumers’ socioeconomic features was analyzed. The results showed that the traffic preference type is the major consumer class in Chinese license plate-restricted cities with the highest overall WTP, followed by the subsidy dependence consumers with the lowest overall WTP and finally the mileage preference consumers with the overall WTP in the middle. In the non-license plate-restricted cities, mileage preference type is the largest consumer class with the highest overall WTP. Similarly, the subsequent type is the subsidy dependence consumers with the lowest overall WTP. And finally the smallest type is the infrastructure preference consumers with the overall WTP in the middle. Further analysis revealed that in the license plate-restricted cities, consumers’ WTP for the product attributes of NEVs in the convenience and technical dimensions goes far beyond than that in the non-license plate-restricted cities, with higher WTP for road use rights and driving range attributes, while consumers in the non-license plate-restricted cities prefer attributes in the economic dimensions with higher WTP for subsidy intensity attribute.