Research On The Impact Of Consumers' Expectation On The Purchase Willingness Of Electric Vehicles

The limited demand scale is a key factor restricting the development of China's electric vehicle industry.Most of the existing literatures explore the consumer's willingness to purchase electric vehicles from the product attributes of automobiles,such as price,operating cost and range.This paper argues that in the external environment where automobile industry policies change frequently and electric vehicle technology develops rapidly but still has considerable uncertainty,consumers' awareness and expectation of the future development of electric vehicles are also important to influence the current willingness to purchase electric vehicles.At present,the shortage of charging infrastructure has become one of the most important factors for China's electric vehicle industry to transition from the market introduction period supported by government's purchase to the growth period of the industry relying on the private spontaneous purchase.Therefore,this paper considers that consumers' willingness to purchase cars is not only affected by the current charging infrastructure,but also related to consumers' expectations of future charging infrastructure,and this expectation is a subjective judgment of consumers rather than perfect expectations.In view of this,this paper collects the stated preference data of 426 respondents' purchase behaviors including the expected number of charging piles by designing discrete selection experiments,and analyzes the impact of the expected increase of charging piles on consumers' current purchase willingness.The research found that when consumers buy electric vehicles,in addition to considering the current number of charging piles,they will also consider the number of charging piles that are expected to increase during the period of driving cars,and the longer the transfer interval,the more improvement of the consumers' current purchase willingness.On average,one expected charging pile added within three years is equivalent to the current 0.61 charging pile.Consumers are willing to pay an additional 21,500 yuan for each additional charging pile expected in three years.Further,the random coefficient logit method is used to test the respondent's preference for the current and expected increased charging pile.The results show that the respondents have heterogeneous preference for the expected increased charging piles while have the namely same preference for current charging piles regardless of the normal distribution or the uniform distribution hypothesis of preference distribution.Finally,based on the intrinsic characteristics of the respondents and the objective vehicle habits,the latent class model is used to classify the heterogeneous respondents.It is found that the more optimistic the electric vehicles are,the less of respondents' use of vehicle,the more likely the respondents are prefer the expected increased charging piles.The conclusions of this paper have certain enlightenment for the “long delayed” industrial problems of electric vehicles and the marketing strategies of manufacturers.