Identifying and bridging the attitude-behavior gap in sustainable transportation adoption

Abstract

Future of the automobile industry in such testing times of global climate change, ever-increasing pollution/carbon emission levels and depleting natural resources, rests in the electrification of the vehicles. The situation in developing countries like India with political and demographical challenges adding to such global crisis raises the concern of sustainable development in the transportation system by manifolds. Electric vehicles (EV) though come across as a rescue towards mitigating this risk of natural disaster, but several barriers are still to be analyzed between EV adoption and consumers’ expectations to leverage this opportunity fully. Although, the literature suggests that consumers today show their concern about the environmental and social performance of products, however, this concern may not necessarily translate to them buying the products. Focusing on this gap, the study proposes an intuitionistic fuzzy set with decision making trial and evaluation laboratory based barrier analysis to identify and analyze real barriers to EV adoption in Indian consumers’ context. Research outcomes are quite intriguing with issues as unique and specific to India like power availability in the country, vehicles’ battery life and most common issue across the globe, lack of charging infrastructure evolving out as the three most pertinent barriers to EV adoption. Results of the present study can surely provide for theoretical support to both the public and private sector in framing their policies.