Abstract
The transportation sector is recognized as one of the largest contributors to the problems of global warming and environmental pollution, and is responsible for a great deal of global energy consumption, which is heavily dependent upon scarce crude oil reserves. Different countries have adopted promotional policies to replace conventional internal combustion engine vehicles with electric vehicles as a means of mitigating global warming. Nevertheless, the current market share of eco-friendly vehicles remains stagnant in many parts of the world. This study aims to investigate the impact and relative importance of financial, technical, and political measures on the market penetration of electric vehicles using an agent-based simulation. More specifically, a series of agent-based simulation experiments is carried out following the statistical experimental design scheme to systematically assess the diffusion of electric vehicles. Affected by various factors and measures, the choice behavior of individual agents is modeled with a multinomial logit utility function of experimental factors. The simulated data are analyzed using different analysis methods, including full factorial analysis, response surface methodology, and support vector machine, in order to scrutinize the effects of different measures. It is advocated that factors affecting the choice of vehicle by individuals, including two-way interactions among various measures as well as policy measures such as purchase subsidies and tax breaks, have more significant effects on the widespread adoption of electric vehicles than do technical improvements in terms of battery charging times and driving mileage. This implies that the adoption of such measures needs to be carefully designed in order to account for potential interactions among individual measures as well as their main effects on the diffusion of electric vehicles.
Highlights
Climate change has emerged as one of the biggest environmental challenges around the globe, mainly due to increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions [1,2]
hybrid electric vehicles (HEVs) and plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) can be categorized as hybrid vehicles (HVs) that have reduced emission levels compared to conventional internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEVs) that use diesel or gasoline, whereas battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and fuel cell electric vehicles (FCEVs) are zero-emission vehicles (ZEVs) that can be considered a viable step toward zero-carbon transportation
While working at an increasing pace to develop technical measures for reducing carbon emissions and excessive energy consumption, a wide variety of policy interventions to cope with global warming and energy scarcity have been adopted by many countries
Summary
Climate change has emerged as one of the biggest environmental challenges around the globe, mainly due to increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions [1,2]. An ABM analysis of innovation diffusion was conducted by incorporating the context of changing social appraisal and regulatory support for eco-friendly vehicles in [13], where two different scenarios were investigated. The market acceptance of EVs in China under multi-policy scenarios was scrutinized through consideration of consumer preferences, charging facilities, and subsidies [19] Along these lines, this study is aimed at contributing to the existing literature on the development of ABM for analyzing the market diffusion of EVs. The defining aspect of this study is to adopt a statistical analysis of experimental design combined with ABM to examine the interactions of individual factors as well as their main effects.
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