Analysis of Urban Electric Vehicle Adoption Based on Operating Costs in Urban Transportation Network

Abstract

Electric vehicles (EVs) are one of the most promising applications that are reshaping the future urban mobility market and benefitting the urban environment. Analyzing the adoption of EVs helps both vehicle sales market management and urban transportation-related environmental cost estimation. Previous studies have shown that EV adoption is mostly affected by the economic environment and users’ psychological factors; however, both factors vary among specific urban transportation networks. This paper thus proposes network-related vehicle operating cost functions and a logit-based choice model, which considers both the economic environment and users’ psychological factors at a network level. The model can thus estimate the vehicle adoption for specific networks. Numerical experiments and sensitivity analyses were conducted to illustrate the proposed method and provide practical insights in estimating EV adoption, respectively. The results suggest that EV adoption greatly varies among different cities.