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Title: Demand for electric automobiles. Final report

Technical Report ·
OSTI ID:5656074

The objective of this report is to specify and estimate models suitable for predicting the demand for electric automobiles, taking into account their key limitations relative to conventional alternatives: limited range, lengthy refueling, lower performance, higher initial price, and greater relative cost for providing additional load-carrying capacity or amenities such as air conditioning. Possible advantages of electric vehicles relative to conventional vehicles, notably lower operating costs, are also considered. Interest centers on the possibility of a mass market for electric vehicles, not identification of specialized markets. Only the private market for electric cars is considered, not commercial or industrial users, and it is assumed multi-car households are the most likely purchasers. Logit models of multi-vehicle households' choices of their smallest cars are estimated on two bodies of data: a panel study conducted by Arthur D. Little (ADL) in the spring of 1978, specifically to test consumers' reactions to hypothetical configurations for electric vehicles; and a sample of multi-vehicle households gathered in Baltimore in the spring of 1977. The ADL panel data allows estimation of consumers' valuations of novel characteristics of electric vehicles, notably limited range coupled with lengthy refueling time. The actual market data from Baltimore serves largely as a check on the validity of estimates obtained from the ADL panel. A generalization of the usual multinomial logit model, called the ordered logit model, is derived in this study from basic economic and statistical principles, and is applied to the ranked choices of the ADL panel; the ordered logit model is compared to the conjoint model employed earlier by ALD.

Research Organization:
Charles River Associates, Inc., Boston, MA (USA)
OSTI ID:
5656074
Report Number(s):
EPRI-EA-2072; ON: DE82900864
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English