Identifying the barriers to the adoption of electric vehicles
Student name: Ms Harsimran Kaur
Guide: Dr Atul Kumar
Year of completion: 2018
Host Organisation: Shakti Sustainable Energy Foundation
Supervisor (Host Organisation): Mr Vivek M Chandran
Abstract: Electric vehicles are an effective way to reduce air pollution, GHG emissions as well as provide with benefits of reduced oil imports thus bringing energy security. In the light of this, while a number of initiatives have already been taken by the Government of India towards promotion of the electrification of public transport, there has been a lack of focus towards the private vehicle segment. This, coupled with the lower EV adoption rates of privately owned vehicles, have been prime motivators of this research. A user perception study was carried out to understand the barriers to the adoption of electric cars in the private vehicle segment. The results show “wait and see†attitude due to the lack of variety of the BEVs across different vehicle segments and different brands. Also, as foreseen, financial barriers such as high purchase price remains a significant barrier in the Indian EV market today.
To understand the prospects of the future purchase price decline of the BEVs, the learning curve approach was used that shows a reduction in the production cost with the scaling of cumulative production. The price forecasts show that there is a prospect of price parity to occur at a cumulative production of 69 lakhs with a learning rate of 12%.
The high purchase price of BEVs can be offset by their lower running costs. For this purpose, complete ownership costs were modelled to understand the price differential between the BEVs and ICEVs today. The results show that even on a TCO based comparison, there is a huge difference between owning a BEV and ICEV. A TCO based cost projection shows that BEVs would become cost-competitive at the cumulative production of 14 lakhs.
This research provides useful information to the policy makers on the policy front to help design better policies and identify new policy levers to make BEVs an attractive option for the consumers and thus stimulate the decarbonisation of transport to improve air quality.
Keywords: electric vehicles, barriers, perceptions, SEM, learning rate, price forecasts, TCO, policy
