Abstract:

As we are observing very grim situation of over 1.2 million deaths occur in the country every year as a result of air pollution, Global energy-related CO2 emissions grew by 1.4% in 2017, reaching a historic high of 32.5 gigatonnes. To overturn this situation a paradigm shift is needed in fossil fuel based transportation system to electric mobility. The government of different countries across the world are supporting and formulating policies to promote the environment friendly transportation system. Despite the developments by governments and innovation by automobile manufacturers, customer, vehicle owners are also keen towards adopting environment friendly Hybrid and Electric vehicles (HEVs). But there seems some mismatch between the stakeholders. Hence, a need is generated to understand the factors affecting customers buying behavior in terms of HEVs such as fuel efficiency, preference of information sources and solicitation by dealers. The study has also included the analysis of government initiatives and identification of action gap from automobile manufacturer in making environment friendly vehicles. The study is based on Faridabad - National Capital Region with a sample size of 500 vehicle owners. Survey software package of Google form through which the data will be transferred onto the Excel spreadsheet. The formulated hypotheses were tested using correlation test, Analysis of variance (ANNOVA) and Chi-Square Test. The study showed that demographic variables like profession and Income had high impact on owning certain type of Vehicle. The factors affecting HEVs buying preference significantly were fuel efficiency, environment friendly, preference of information sources whereas solicitation by dealers has very less impact on buying preference. The possible action gap identified during the study was vehicle manufacturer and government authorities should focus on sufficient number of filling stations for alternative fuels in place as 1st highest important ranked purchase criterion.