How much do you know about electric vehicle owners’ travel habits? Still not much …

The mass proliferation of electric vehicles (EVs) is widely regarded as one of the most effective solutions to the current climate change crisis. National governments so far have implemented a wide range of policy measures to strongly support the EV rollout, including the deployment of purchase incentives, introduction of registration tax rebates, extension of warranty periods, access to public transport lanes, just to name a few. With the increasing number of greener vehicles, one would expect an increasing abundance of data on EV owners’ travel preference behaviour too. Nonetheless, the reality is quite the opposite, in that information on EV users and their travel patterns remains largely limited.

Initially, one of the main obstacles in obtaining real-world data on EVs stemmed from their relatively low rate of adoption compared to conventional fossil-fuel powered vehicles. In Australia, for example, only 49 electric cars were reported to be driven in 2011 (International Energy Agency, 2016). After EVs gaining popularity, more observational data became available to researchers and policymakers for their empirical investigations. However, data were usually in an aggregated form and available from fragmented sources, while also often affected by numerous missing observations. The poor data quality resulted in forecasting exercises undertaken via the use of driving preference behaviour of conventional vehicle owners. Restrictive analytical assumptions were also made necessary to simplify the complexity of predictions. The most common assumption was to treat the population under examination as if it were a statistic object throughout time. However, this implied that any simulated scenario typically disregarded the impact that structural changes to the population itself due to factors, such as, economic crisis, national/international conflicts, immigration measures, exerted on individuals’ travel and purchase behaviour.

Over the years, the scarcity of data has led more and more transportation modelers to rely almost exclusively on web-based questionnaires. Nevertheless, their dissemination is usually commissioned to third parties who make use of pre-sets of panellists, mostly made up of prospective clients rather than actual EV owners. Given that survey administration costs have also skyrocketed in the last ten years, researchers often found themselves making a trade-off between the number of questions to ask and the number of respondents to interview. More often than not, analysts prioritize the sample size which can yet affect the variety of topics covered in the questionnaire. Consequently, many studies have abandoned the goal of extrapolating comprehensive information from EV drivers’ experience in favour of investigating primarily consumers’ purchase intentions. The assessment of consumers’ purchase preferences is usually carried out by showing respondents a series of hypothetical purchase scenarios from which they have to choose the electric vehicle that most appeal to them from a list of provided options. The answers collected are next analysed to give an indication of how much consumers are willing to pay for different combinations of vehicle characteristics. Despite being useful, measures of the willingness to pay alone partially enhance our understanding of how the EV market will evolve over time. In fact, respondents should also be asked to indicate how far they would travel with the selected vehicle, whether the selected vehicle would be added to the household vehicle fleet or replace an existing one, or where the chosen vehicle would be likely charged. The collection of this information would in part compensate for the lack of knowledge of EV owners’ driving and charging decisions. Without rich data, policy makers are likely to struggle to develop strategic interventions that can effectively strengthen the demand for EVs.

How can the existing lack of data on EV owners’ travel patterns be overcome in Australia?

The answer to this question is that Australia launches its own national longitudinal EV survey. Institutions, policymakers, and political authorities can potentially team up on the development of a comprehensive EV questionnaire that adequately investigates EV charging behaviour, travel decisions and overall experiences with EVs. A national EV survey will not only bridge the existing knowledge gap of EV owners, but also ensure the preservation of the data quality and the representatives of the sample (EV owners should be sampled from all over Australia). Further, the longitudinal nature of the data collection will allow for capturing potential variations in EV owners’ driving and charging preferences that might occur overtime. Internationally, the German Mobility Panel (GMP) serves as an example of a national longitudinal study that collects data on mobility/charging decisions of a (still relatively small) sample of battery electric vehicle owners, alongside other transport information. The GMP incorporates questions designed to gather information on respondents’ daily car trips over an eight-week period, such as the inter-charging duration (in days) between two consecutive charging activities, the distance travelled (in kms) before charging the vehicle, the location where the charging activity is undertaken, as well as the characteristics of the vehicle and the EV owner (KANTAR, 2022; Vallée et al., 2022). Incorporating some of these questions into the EV national survey would be crucial for accurately forecast the evolution of EVs in Australia. Meanwhile, private charging operators and research institutions should strengthen their collaboration. Currently, for example, public charging companies tend to avoid sharing the information on charging instances recorded at their outlets. When they do share it, they often require the interested party to commit large financial resources for acquiring the data. Ideally, data extracted from web-based surveys should be coupled with public charging data. This combination will enrich our comprehension of EV owners’ travel behaviour, while also revealing what needs to be done to further improve the public EV infrastructure network.

The Institute of Transport and Logistic studies (ITLS) has partnered with the Australian Vehicle Council to design a survey on EV vehicle ownership experience. More than 1700 respondents have agreed to spontaneously partake in the EV vehicle ownership survey between February and March 2024. Of these 1700 respondents, approximately 1550 participants are reported to be electric vehicle owners. In the next future, additional data collections will be administrated with ultimate goal of better understanding the factors that are still preventing a large-scale diffusion of EVs in Australia.

References

International Energy Agency, (2016) International energy outlook.
KANTAR 2022. Deutsches Mobilitätspanel MOP – Erhebung der Alltagsmobilität sowie der Pkw-Fahrleistungen und Kraftstoffverbräuche – Endbericht zum Paneljahr 2021/2022.

Vallée, J., Ecke, L., Chlond, B., Vortisch, P. 2022. Deutsches Mobilitätspanel MOP – Wissenschaftliche Begleitung und Auswertungen Bericht 2021/2022: Alltagsmobilität und Fahrleistung.