Explaining the Public Acceptance of Electrified L-Category Vehicles Towards Sustainable Urban Mobility Planning

Abstract

In this paper, we investigated public acceptance of Light Electric Vehicles (EL-Vs) using data collected from 39,795 trips of 4 different types of 225 EL-Vs’ real usage and 9,820 questionnaires, within the one year long demonstrations of the ELVITEN EU project in six cities. Data consist of users’ perceptions and attitudes collected via questionnaire surveys before, during and after the demonstrations; trip data obtained using data loggers installed on the EL-Vs and usage data collected from the project’s ICT tools. The research approach followed to explore the human factors that affect users’ behavioral intention to use EL-Vs as well as to boost their acceptance and wide deployment is based on the Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology 2 (UTAUT2) and consists of 3 phases. Initially, the design and implementation of the ELVITEN ICT components has been conducted by mapping the UTAUT2 constructs into their functionalities and the effect of all the constructs in relation with these components on the Use Behavior has been examined. At the second stage, in order to study the impact of the demonstrations on the acceptance of EL-Vs, appropriate measures have been selected for each of the UTAUT2 constructs, and the calculation methodology was determined. At the later stage, the model has been validated, the analysis carried out and the hypotheses set has been tested and validated.