Abstract
Electric car-sharing services (ECS) have been promoted as a solution to combat negative urban mobility externalities and are expected to be facilitated by fleets of autonomous vehicles. There is little evidence regarding the behavioral intention to use autonomous ECS (AECS), especially on the transition from using ECS. This paper investigates the behavioral intention to use AECS using psychological constructs partially from the extended unified theory of acceptance and use of technology (UTAUT2) and an additional one expressing safety concern. A novel behavioral intention model is presented to capture the transitional behavioral intention to use two adjacent generations of sharing mobility services. Results of structural equation models applied to a survey sample of 2154 respondents from France, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain show that the introduction of AECS is very likely to be accepted by ECS users. Hedonic motivation is found to be a much stronger predictor of behavioral intention to use AECS as opposed to safety concern, while performance expectancy and social influence are strong drivers of intention to use ECS and have indirect effects on the intention to use AECS. Multigroup analysis indicates heterogeneous behavioral intention across countries. The multi-faceted empirical results generate insights into the deployment and management of AECS in various contexts.
Highlights
In the last century, the urbanization process and improved quality of life in cities have been accompanied by an explosive increase in car ownership and use for urban mobility
The relationships between psychological factors, socio-demographic characteristics, and the behavioral intention to use electric car-sharing services (ECS) and autonomous ECS (AECS) are investigated through structural equation modeling (SEM) applied to the latent variables measured through the 5-point Likert scale items (Ullman and Bentler 2003)
The SEM results are reported in Subsection 4.2, with a part addressing the moderating effects on the UTAUT2 dimensions and another part showing the impacts of the UTAUT2 dimensions
Summary
The urbanization process and improved quality of life in cities have been accompanied by an explosive increase in car ownership and use for urban mobility. Compared to ICE-based cars, electric cars had inferior performance in terms of lower driving range and density of charging station locations (Thøgersen and Ebsen 2019). These aspects increased the operational costs of running ECS and caused inconvenience to users. ECS remained unpopular in the 2000s and experienced a renaissance only in the last decade Their adoption has recently been spurred by the introduction of more flexible one-way station-based or free-floating sharing schemes, advanced information systems to improve convenience and reduce transaction costs, and cutting-edge vehicular technologies (Becker et al 2017; Wang and Liao 2021)
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