Building Charging Network For Electric Vehicles In Automobile Supply Chains

Customers’willingness to pay for an electric vehicle (EV) is severely limited by the driving range of the EV. Building more charging stations is a way to alleviate consumers’ anxiety on EV’s driving range, which in turn increases the willingness to pay of consumers and the market adoption rate of EV. This dissertation focuses on finding which party, the car manufacturer or the distributor (dealer) in an EV supply chain, are more suitable to take charge of building EV charging networks with and without government subsidy policies. I examine the practices and the literature about the related business models, and investigate the following three research questions.Firstly, this dissertation investigates a "builder selection" problem under the settings of automobile supply chain, i.e., who should build the charging stations, manufacturers or dealers, to achieve a better adoption level in EV market? Hereafter we use M-Building and D-Building to represent the models where manufacturer builds the charging stations and dealer builds the charging stations respectively. Our conclusions show that when the wholesale price is exogenous and fixed, M-Building facilitates the adopting of EVs better at the beginning stage of the development of a EV market (with a high initial value of range anxiety), D-Building facilitates the adopting of EVs better when the EV market becomes mature (with a low initial value of range anxiety). However, when the wholesale price is a decision made by the manufacturer, M-Building is always better than D-Building in facilitating the adopting of EV. Moreover, this dissertation shows the preferences of manufacturer and dealer on the choice of M-Building and D-Building by comparing their profits in the proposed models. For dealer, he always likes M-Building. For manufacturer, however, he likes D-Building only when the initial value of range anxiety is big and both the production cost and building cost are small. Otherwise, he likes building charging stations by himself.Secondly, this dissertation investigates the impacts of different government subsidy policies (consumer subsidy and manufacturer subsidy) on the equilibrium pricing and charging network building decision in the models of M-Building and D-Building, respectively. This dissertation provides the conditions under which one subsidy policy (either consumer subsidy and manufacturer subsidy) is better than the other in achieving larger charging networks or higher adoption levels. The conclusions are as follow:1) In the M-Building with fixed wholesale price, consuming subsidy facilitates higher adoption level but manufacturing subsidy facilitates larger charging networks;2) In the D-Building with fixed wholesale price, consuming subsidy facilitates both higher adoption level and larger charging networks;3) When the wholesale price is endogenous, there is no difference between the effects of consumer subsidy and manufacturer subsidy;4) Consuming subsidy is better for improving dealer’s profit, while manufacturing subsidy is better for improving manufacturer’s profit.Finally, this dissertation investigates the strategies in which the building cost is shared between manufacturers and dealers in M-Building and D-Building model, respectively. The impacts of cost allocation on pricing and building decisions are examined. Moreover, this dissertation finds the "win-win" schemes for cost allocation models in which the profits of both manufacturer and dealer are improved. I also examine the sensitivity of parameters changes in these "win-win" schemes. The conclusions are as follow:1) This is Chinese style change it to1) When the initial value of range anxiety is big and the building cost is small, the principle investor does not want to share much building cost;2) In M-Building, for manufacturer, the lost of pricing power on wholesale price, however, will induce dealer to share more building cost;3) In D-Building, with the pricing power on wholesale price, manufacturer can get more profit so that he could share more building cost;4) In M-Building, with the increases in production cost, dealer would increase his allocated building cost;5) In D-Building, with the increase in production cost, manufacturer increases his allocated building cost only when the wholesale price is fixed.