A Research On New Energy Vehicle Consumers’ Preferences And Characteristics Profiling

The central and eastern regions in China were wrapped in thick fog in recent years.During the period from the end of2013to early spring in2014, the central and southernnorth of China, east of Huanghuai, Jianghuai, northeast of Jiangnan and other places alsoappeared haze, the air pollution condition worried a lot of chinese people.Relevant data putforward that motor vehicle pollution is the most important cause of the haze andphotochemical smog pollution.Considering the double pressure of scarce energy andenvironment pollution, the trend of the development of new energy vehicles isunmistakable.Stated choice experimental design is a method for consumers to construct a simulationof purchasing situation which provides a intuitive and real product to buy, so as to realizethe specific analysis on importance of different influence factors of products.At present, thediscrete choice experiment method applied in many fields in the papers about consumerpurchasing preferences.This is a specifical stated choice experimental design research onChina’s new energy vehicle which takes account of the market and policy characteristics.There are several research emphases in several ways of this paper:1. From the perspective of the consumer, we using stated choice experiment to evaluatethe factors that influence the preference of consumers to purchase new energy vehicles. Inthe paper, we analyze the important attributes of plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs)and pure electric vehicles (EVs) which influence consumers’ purchase decisions in ourcountry, derive the consumer’s willingness to pay (WTP) of new energy vehicles’ attributesand evaluate market share of different type vehicles. Concrete survey is taken to find out thepotential impact of government subsidies and charging infrastructure for people to buy newenergy vehicles. Different with existing research, we recognize vehicle prices and subsidiesas different attributes in the research to investigate whether the subsidies is equivalent toreducing prices. Results suggest that consumers’ willingness to choose plug-in hybridelectric vehiclesand pure electric vehicles are lower with the same condition of gasolinevehicles (GVs). The policy such as subsidies and construction of charging infrastructure canstimulate consumption, and our study highlights marginal utility of subsidy is significantlygreater than that of price.2. We further examine five variables: characteristics of individual consumers,consumer preferences of using vehicle, cognitive and attitude, vehicle attribute and policystimulus through hybrid choice models (HCM) that incorporating integrated latent variables into discrete choice model in order to analyze the specific cases with psychological latentvariables. The result indicates that the model with latent variables has better data fitting andstronger explanatory power. In terms of the application of HCMs, we find the consumercharacteristics that are easier to accept the new energy vehicles. In addition, we discuss thecomprehensive factors that influence the Chinese customers to buy new energy vehicles.3. Furthermore, according to the whole new energy vehicle market, we adopt a latentclass choice model that combined with related attributes of new energy vehicles,demographic variables and relevent latent variables to determine the segmentation of thenew energy vehicles market. Finally, we discuss the different characteristics and preferencesof consumers in various segmentation markets, and this finding is likely to provideproduction, marketing and positioning guide suggestions and comments for new energyvehicle manufacturing enterprises.