ScholarWorks @ UVM ScholarWorks @ UVM Analysis of a consumer survey on plug-in hybrid electric vehicles Analysis of a consumer survey on plug-in hybrid electric vehicles

Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) show potential to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, increase fuel efﬁciency, and offer driving ranges that are not limited by battery capacity. However, these beneﬁts will not be realized if consumers do not adopt this new technology. Several agent-based models have been developed to model potential market penetration of PHEVs, but gaps in the available data limit the usefulness of these models. To address this, we administered a survey to 1000 stated US residents, using Amazon Mechanical Turk, to better understand factors inﬂuencing the potential for PHEV market penetration. Our analysis of the survey results reveals quantitative patterns and correlations that extend the existing literature. For example, respondents who felt most strongly about reducing US transportation energy consumption and cutting greenhouse gas emissions had, respectively, 71 and 44 times greater odds of saying they would consider pur- chasing a compact PHEV than those who felt least strongly about these issues. However, even the most inclined to consider a compact PHEV were not generally willing to pay more than a few thousand US dollars extra for the sticker price. Consistent with prior research, we found that ﬁnancial and battery-related concerns remain major obstacles to wide- spread PHEV market penetration. We discuss how our results help to inform agent-based models of PHEV market penetration, governmental policies, and manufacturer pricing and marketing strategies to promote consumer adoption of PHEVs. an extensive online survey of 1000 stated adult US residents using the Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) crowd-sourcing platform to collect and analyze quantitative data in more depth than previous surveys. Our goals were to gather data to (i) identify consumer characteristics (if any) that differentiate between those willing and those not willing to consider adopting PHEV technology, (ii) identify possible factors that could positively inﬂuence consumers’ willingness to consider adopting the new PHEV technology, (iii) assess how much extra consumers might be willing to pay up front to purchase a vehicle with the expectation of fuel savings in the future, and (iv) construct and analyze distributions and correlations between consumer demographics and attitudes. In short, this AMT consumer survey was designed to better understand the attributes associated with, and the inﬂuences that might affect a person’s decision to buy a PHEV, and how consumers weigh the tradeoffs between short and long-term ﬁnancial, convenience, and environmental priorities and concerns. A speciﬁc objective of this study was to obtain detailed quantitative data necessary to improve the deci-sion-making rules and inform agent and vehicle ﬂeet initialization for the agent-based model ﬁrst published in Eppstein et al. (2011). a compact PHEV (independent of price or other vehicle characteristics) was explored using ordinal logistic regression, with odds-ratios and 95% conﬁdence intervals reported. Our analysis included multinomial logistic regression on sets of questions to build a predictive statistical model of participants reporting they ‘‘would deﬁnitely’’ or ‘‘would not’’ consider purchasing a compact PHEV. For the latter, we performed a 5-fold cross-validation; for each of 5 trials, we trained the model using 85% of the