Understanding the adoption intention for electric vehicles: The role of hedonic-utilitarian values

Generally, electric vehicles (EVs) are viewed as an innovation contributing to address environmental concern and energy exhaustion caused by excessive motorized driving. Based on a “perception-belief-intention” paradigm, this study endeavors to investigate people's intention to adopt EVs, where multiple factors including perceived risk and perceived benefit (i.e., perceptions), attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control are jointly considered. More importantly, predictive importance of psychological determinants for EVs adoption intention is assumed to vary depending on people's evaluations about the hedonic-utilitarian value, i.e., the extent to which they are motivated by the hedonic and utilitarian values of EVs. A four-step analytical framework is performed to achieve the objective, suggesting that (1) overall, the basic paradigm is confirmed, where attitude is the fundamental antecedent of adoption intention among TPB factors, and perceived functional risk negatively influences EVs adoption intention, while the roles of perceived financial risk and perceived benefit are complicated; (2) four groups with diverse hedonic-utilitarian motivational pattern are obtained based the self-organizing map, each exhibiting distinctive considerations regarding intention to adopt EVs. The findings offer some valuable implications for policymakers and industries about how EVs adoption could be encouraged in the backdrop of an emerging sustainable transportation market.