Agent-Based Modelling of Electric Vehicles Adoption: Assessing Range Anxiety and Environmental Awareness's Impact

As the importance of environmental safeguards grows, European countries are taking stronger actions to reduce air pollution and address climate change. To achieve environmental sustainability demanded by the Green Deal's neutrality goals, the reduction of greenhouse gases by the automotive sector plays a fundamental role. The deployment of the adoption of electric vehicles seems to be an effective strategic policy in this direction. Researchers have addressed this topic by focusing mainly on specific technical or external variables to serve particular research purposes; other research models are specifically related to some empirical realities, limiting the possibilities for generalization and theory development. As a result, to the best of our knowledge, there is a lack of studies that analyse the impact of behavioural factors on EV adoption. In our paper, we address this research gap by developing an empirical agent-based model for the adoption of electric vehicles in a community of individuals, evaluating the impact of range anxiety and environmental awareness. Range anxiety is a key variable that plays a fundamental role in electric vehicle adoption, and it can be balanced by environmental awareness. We find that while the adoption is inversely proportional to range anxiety, it is directly proportional to environmental awareness. The research sheds light on the importance of behavioural variables affecting the adoption rate and provides new instruments for policymakers to promote coordination and international networking, enabling the development of new policies. Further research could investigate the antecedents of range anxiety and ways to raise environmental awareness to speed up the transition to sustainable mobility.