Profit model for electric vehicle rental service: Sensitive analysis and differential pricing strategy

Abstract

Electric vehicle rental service is an effective operation mode to promote the application of EVs in terms of the energy conservation and the environmental protection for urban governance. The pricing scheme of EV rental service is one of the most important issues that affect the development trend of the industry. In this paper, a comprehensive profit model of EV rental service is constructed based on time-based subscription pricing. The profit model consists of multiple factors, including the average frequency of EV utilization, correlation coefficients between EV's driving distance and its contribution to maintenance and battery charging costs, EV's grade level and maximum possible arrival rate of customers, etc. Sensitive analysis is conducted based on Design of Experiment method, to comprehensively analyze the influence of each factor on profit and extract the key factors, which have the highest impacts on profit. Finally, based on the sensitive analysis result, differential pricing strategy is proposed to boost lessors' profit and increase customers' satisfactory level simultaneously. The results show that differential pricing strategy can at most increase the optimal profit by 19.88% compared to the time-based subscription pricing.