Examining Individuals Preferences For New Energy Vehicles

The rapid popularization of cars has greatly facilitated the lives of residents, but also exacerbated the serious energy and environmental problems of our country. National and lo-cal governments are vigorously promoting the use of new energy vehicles, but the effect is far lower than expected. As a significant promotion of individuals to buy new energy vehi-cles, after all, subsidy policy is the product of the government stage adjustment.Currently, environmental problems have aroused widespread public concern and the subsidy of new energy vehicles is decreasing. Surrounding the variables of subsidies, traffic management policies and greenhouse gas emissions, the SP survey questionnaire based on the orthogonal principle is adopted to obtain the preference of the individuals who plan to purchase the car within five years. Then, a MNL model and multiple NL models are estab-lished to analyze the influence of program characteristics, personal characteristics, travel characteristics and consumer awareness on the selection of plug-in hybrid and pure electric vehicles, as well as the vehicle attributesthat the potential new energy vehicles buyers may focus. Finally, the software of NLOGIT is applied to solve these models. There are several research emphasizes as follows.Firstly, the NL model calibration results show that the subsidy, traffic management poli-cy and greenhouse gas emissions could significantly affect the behavior of consumer vehicle selection, and traffic management policy could truly alleviate the negative impact of the de-creasing subsidy. Besides, individuality variables such as gender, age, etc., have no signifi-cant effect on PHV and EV preferences. Compared to EV and CV, respondents who plan to buy PHV are more reluctant to bypass to supplement the energy.Secondly, in order to gain a better understanding of the impact of vehicle GHG emis-sions on consumer vehicle selection, this attribute is added to the part of SP survey and vehi-cle attributes survey, respectively. Assuming that there are no differences in the aspect of ve-hicle attributes between the new energy vehicles and conventional fuel vehicles, in the SP survey, the results show that the vehicle greenhouse gas emissions can significantly affect the purchase of consumer vehicles. However, in the analysis of vehicle attributes, green-house gas emissions rank last second, and consumers do not pay attention to this factor. Only consumers planning to buy new energy vehicles are concerned about the vehicle's green-house gas emissions.Thirdly,to understand the impact of individual's perceptions of new energy vehicles on vehicle selection, the third part of the questionnaire describes five views on the new energy vehicles. The individual's perceptions of new energy vehicleswill be treated as a dummy var-iable and be introduced into the NL model.The results show that individuals generally agree the point of view in the four aspects of the environmental protection, fuel costs, the direction of future car development and willingness to buy a new energy vehicle in ten years of new energy vehicles, but they do not agree the view that the maintenance and repair costs of new energy vehicles are lower than traditional fuel vehicles. In the aspect of maintenance and re-pair costs, the individuals are more inclined to choose the traditional fuel vehicles.Finally, the theory of elasticity is introduced into the study of consumer vehicle prefer-ences to describe the changes in the choice of consumer behavior with the variation of subsi-dies, traffic management policies and greenhouse gas emissions. The results show that these three variables are all inelastic in the choice of PHV and EV. In the background of subsidy retreat, consumers of new energy vehicles choice is mainly transferred in PHV and EV selec-tion. Therefor, the subsidy retreatwill not give the new energy car market a huge impact.