Factors affecting future demand for electric vehicles: a model based study

This paper develops a system dynamics model of the UK take-up of electric vehicles over the next 40 years. The model extends previous work by Struben and Sterman (2008) to allow analysis of the UK market. The impact on uptake and CO2 emissions of factors such as subsidies, range, charge point availability, emission rates and a revenue preserving tax are considered. We show that subsidies have little impact on take-up under a traditional business as usual case. However, when we introduce a conditional marketing scenario, they play an important role in tipping the market into a successful trajectory. The sensitivity of the results to assumptions on word of mouth, average vehicle life and emissions rates are explored and we find that changing these can result in a greater impact on take-up and emissions than policy or vehicle attribute factors. Our results have important policy implications.