Suggested Citation:
Jenn, Alan, Gil Tal, Lewis Fulton (2017) A Multi-Model Approach to Generating International Electric Vehicle Future Adoption Scenarios. Institute of Transportation Studies, University of California, Davis, Research Report UCD-ITS-RR-17-25

The widespread adoption of electric vehicles is an essential transition towards reducing the climate impact of the transportation sector. As the international community seeks to decrease carbon emissions into the future, the impact of electric vehicles is still highly dependent on its success in displacing conventional internal combustion engine vehicles. Our work contributes to a large body of literature forecasting the electric vehicle market. We leverage a unique dataset of new vehicle registrations from 2005 through 2015 to calibrate several models for the purposes of forecasting. The data was acquired in a joint venture with the International Energy Agency and spans 39 countries, 4,771 models, 503 manufacturers, and over 500 million new vehicle registrations from 2008 through 2015. Due to the inherent uncertainty in forecasting models, we take a three-pronged approach by constructing 1) discrete choice modeling approach, 2) diffusion of innovation approach, and 3) regression of trends approach. We attempt to understand what levels of adoption will be seen over the next 40 years through various scenarios of policy intervention, natural price decreases in the technology, and a number of other attribute changes. Importantly, we are able to observe different responses in various international markets to a number of different parameters.

Keywords: BEV, deployment