Analysis of New Zealand Specific Electric Vehicle Adoption Barriers and Government Policy

Abstract

The New Zealand (NZ) Transport sector represents over 40% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions from the energy sector. Electric Vehicles (EV) are fast emerging globally as a viable alternative to traditional fossil fuel burning cars. In hope of addressing the low EV adoption in NZ, the Ministry of Transport published a series of EV policies in May 2016.

The literature review found a broad spectrum of EV adoption barriers from a global perspective covering technology, economic, social, environmental, and political factors. However, the analysis of barriers from a NZ perspective is overly simplistic and largely based on international findings with little empirical evidence specific to NZ. The most influential barriers specific to NZ are deemed as 1) range; 2) charging time; 3) purchase price; 4) charging facilities and 5) NZ car market.

While there is literature which evaluates global policies and suggests effective policies for NZ, there is no current research that evaluates whether the latest NZ government policy is going to be effective in improving EV uptake in NZ. These papers tend to prescribe a solution of government policies without truly knowing whether their assumptions about EV adoption barriers apply to NZ.

Using a mixed methodology, a questionnaire containing both quantitative and qualitative research questions was carried out.

The findings of this paper show there are four major NZ specific barriers, namely 1) high purchase price; 2) unknown cost of ownership (i.e. service, maintenance and repair); 3) lack of charging facilities and 4) lack of EV knowledge. Other barriers highlighted by literature such as range and charging time are found to be less influential barriers.

Overall, the sentiment for EV adoption is positive and the government policy is deemed to be reasonably effective as it either directly or indirectly addresses the above four barriers; however, certain policies such as ones addressing the cost of ownership can be improved.