Sustainable transportation perspective: how our preferences for zero-emission vehicles change through time?

Abstract

The Slovenian automobile market has gained great momentum in the past decade. However, the demand contractions in the supply chain created a huge crisis in the automobile industry in Slovenia. The automotive industry's new competitive dynamics focus on green logistics, sustainability, and purchase decisions. The study aims to comparatively analyze the factors affecting consumers' automobile purchasing decisions from a sustainable transportation perspective. In the survey, we included 1502 participants to identify the most important parameters of consumer behaviour related to purchasing alternative fuel vehicles. In the regression analysis results in the first analysis, non-financial factors sub-dimensions such as the body shape and fuel type, vehicle size, and style/appearance/colour had a positive effect on purchasing decisions of zero-emission cars. The second analysis was performed 5 years after the first analysis. Moreover, the findings provide insights that non-financial factors sub-dimensions such as entertainment system, vehicle size, and vehicle capacity and financial factors sub-dimensions between the insurance group for the vehicle, finance deals, value for money, annual road tax had a positive effect on purchasing decisions of zero-emission vehicles in the second analysis. Results show that the most relevant factor for purchasing zero-emission vehicles is total vehicle price and that the segment of potential alternative fuel vehicle consumers is much higher than it has been anticipated. This study provides an overview of the current understanding of individuals' vehicle purchasing decisions.