The impact of mediating role of adoption behavioural constructs between stimulating agents and electric vehicle purchase intention

Abstract

Background: The launch of electric vehicles (EV) is essential to sustainable mobility and impact reduction for the environment. While past studies addressed impacts of technological and policy factors on the adoption of electric vehicles, there is lack of attention paid to the behavioural mechanisms through which stimulating variables affect the purchasing intentions of consumers. This study focusses on analysing mediating effect of adoption behaviour variables between stimulating factors i.e. environmental awareness, market readiness and environmental concern and consumer's intention to adopt EVs. Methodology: Cross sectional survey was carried out with combination of online and offline data collection methodology. Researcher has collected 1942 responses through structured questionnaire based on five-point Likert scale and out of which 212 were filtered out during the screening process resulting in the collection of 1730 legitimate respondents. The participants were picked from the customer and prospective buyers of the leading electric vehicle manufacturers in India. The reliability, validity, structural correlations and the mediating effects of the measurement model were performed with the help of PLS-SEM (Bootstrapping). Results: This study reveals that the effects of market readiness have the most important impact on adoption behaviour components followed by environmental awareness and environmental concern. All of the adoption behavioural constructs, i.e., green marketing, consumer trust, perceived usefulness, behavioural intention and technological innovation have a large and favourable effect on the purchase intention of EV. The behavioural intention was found to be the primary predictor of the purchase intention. Mediation study established is that adoption behavioural dimensions significantly mediate the associations between stimulating variables and purchase intention with green marketing and behavioural intention recognised as main mediators. Conclusion: The present findings show that the influence of stimulating and adoption constructs on EV purchase intention occur majorly through behavioural and technological process of change rather than the direct effects. This study enhances the theory of technology adoption by having environmental, market, and behavioural dimensions to a coherent technology adoption framework, which can support specific behavioural, technological, and policy interventions that can be utilized to support EV adoption by policy makers and industry stakeholders.