A Bibliometric Analysis and Review of Adoption Behaviour of Electric Vehicles

With unceasing growth in the number of motor vehicles leading to the deterioration in environmental quality, the advancement of energy-efficient electric vehicles has become a significant objective of the automobile industry and a significant area of study for researchers in the recent past. This study presents a comprehensive review and a bibliometric analysis of EV-related studies published during the last two decades, with a particular focus on studies from the developing economies. Scopus TM database is used to search for documents focusing on transportation engineering and allied sciences-related problems, resulting in 1875 journal articles. These articles are analysed to understand the current status of research by considering some of the classic indicators such as the number of publications, the number of citations, H-index for countries and journals. A simple analysis shows that the number of studies on EVs has rapidly been increasing over the last decade. The analysis also reveals a strikingly lower number of publications from the developing economies as compared to the developed economies. A conceptual framework is developed and subsequently used to identify and categorise individual characteristics and alternative attributes affecting electric vehicle adoption. The individualistic factors reviewed in this study include personality traits such as environmental enthusiasm and technological enthusiasm, psychological factors such as attitude, emotions and anxiety and social factors such as social image, self-identity, and social influence. The alternative attributes include financial factors such as perceived fee, monetary value and total cost of ownership, convenience factors such as refuelling time, infrastructural facilities and effort expectancy and technological factors such as driving range, speed, and acceleration. In addition, this study also reviews the impact of socio-demographic variables, knowledge or experience with electric vehicles and policy implementations. This review found psychological, social and performance attributes to be the most stable factors in most of the studies. The improvement and development of supporting infrastructure viz. charging and service facilities was also found to be a positive factor in improving the adoption behaviour by most of the studies.