Abstract:

Germany has taken steps to encourage the adoption of electric vehicles, but adoption has been modest thus far. A wider range of issues and stakeholder priorities must be considered when assessing the decarbonization of the transportation sector. According to a multi-criteria analysis, car owners and manufacturers are likely to resist e-mobility. A decision model based on the multi-criteria approach is heavily depends on the characteristics of the car categories and the weights that determine stakeholders' motivations. In reality, neither the precise attributes nor the precise weights are known. In practice, neither the exact characteristics nor the exact weights are known exactly. By systematically varying the characteristics and weights, the authors take these uncertainties into account and test the robustness of the results. Moreover, they identify factors linked to policy measures promoting a particular car technology. Whilst the authors find that incentivizing the adoption of hybrids is possible, shifting the attitude of car users towards electric vehicles is difficult, since electric vehicles have disadvantages for this stakeholder. Electric utilities support electric vehicles, as they are consistent with their business model whilst government supports them only once ecological and economic concerns gain equal importance. This indicates that new approaches involving penalizing conventional cars may be necessary to the dissemination of electric cars.