Suggested Citation:
Robbennolt, Dale, Scott Hardman, Jeremy Firestone, Chandra R. Bhat (2025)

A Model of Electric Vehicle Adoption and Motivating Reasons for Adoption

While there is broad interest in understanding electric vehicle (EV) adoption patterns, many existing studies are confined to an examination of stated adoption intentions rather than revealed behaviors. Accordingly, we use a survey of 1,098 California households to examine the ways that demographics, lifestyle preferences, and perceptions of EV characteristics impact revealed adoption behaviors. In addition, the survey asked current EV owners to rank the importance of a set of factors that influenced their adoption decision, enabling an investigation of the motivations for EV ownership. By modeling EV adoption and the motivations in a joint binary-ranked choice framework, we account for sample selection effects, enabling us to generalize these motivations to the population at large and identify policy measures to encourage adoption among those who have yet to adopt. This approach provides insights into the implementation of EV incentive policies, deployment of EVs, and development of EV charging infrastructure.