Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Technological Forecasting & Social Change journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/techfore The joint effects of driving hedonism and trialability on the choice between internal combustion engine, hybrid, and electric vehicles Anat Tchetchik a , Liat I. Zvi b , Sigal Kaplan c , Vered Blass d, ⁎ a The Department of Geography and Environment, Bar Ilan University, Ramat-Gan 5290002, Israel b The Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel c Department of Geography, The Hebrew University if Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel d The Porter School of the Environment and Earth Sciences, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv 69978, Israel ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Electric vehicles BEV Hybrid vehicles HEV Discrete choice Latent variables Diffusion of innovation Driving hedonism ABSTRACT The low penetration rate of electric vehicles (EVs) is raising concern among policy makers and car designers who face risky decisions whether to invest in EV technology and promotion. Traditionally, battery electric vehicles (BEV) and hybrid electric vehicles (HEV) were considered successive technologies. Yet, it is becoming apparent that in the next few decades these technologies will co-exist, which revives the interest in the choice amongst them. This study focuses on normative and hedonic goals to understand the impact of innovativeness and driving hedonism and their interaction with user experience and pro-environmental attitudes of consumers choosing between conventional, hybrid and electric cars. The behavioral model challenges utility-based models of auto propulsion choices by integrating hedonic goal-framing and its interaction with product experience into Rogers’ diffusion of innovation model. In a discrete choice experiment informed by stated-preference Bayesian efficient design among 309 participants, we find that the interaction between driving hedonism and BEV 'trialability' is positively related to the adoption of HEVs rather than of BEVs. Compared to environmental consumers who lack driving hedonism, the segment of innovative-environmentalists act as BEV adoption pioneers and the segment of innovative-environmentalist-hedonists are HEV adoption pioneers. 1. Introduction Battery electric vehicles (BEVs) and hybrid vehicles (HEVs) are considered technologies with the potential to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions, in comparison to internal combustion engines (ICEs). Because no specific motor engine technology is likely to satisfy the full range of stakeholders' needs and expectations, a portfolio of propulsion technologies is likely to be more feasible than a single dominant tech- nology in the next 40 years (Propfe et al., 2013). While both HEV and BEV technologies (EVs hereafter) are con- sidered “work in progress” (Liao et al., 2017), governments and man- ufacturers are striving towards reducing purchase price and eliminating functional barriers of such vehicles, including improving recharging infrastructure and driving range, which rank highest among the func- tional barriers (Bakker and Trip, 2013; Larson et al., 2014). With EVs costing 1.4 times higher on average than their conventional counter- parts, they are beginning to be a commercially viable option (Bahamonde-Birke and Hanappi, 2016; Plötz et al., 2014; Hardman et al., 2016; Vassileva and Campillo, 2017; Haustein and Jensen, 2018). Considering the daily driving patterns found in Europe and North America both for ICE and EVs, modern EV driving range is already sufficient (Pearre et al., 2011; Liu et al., 2015; Fetene et al., 2017; Plötz et al., 2017). To realize the potential of EVs, policy incentives are im- plemented in many countries, including infrastructure investments, shared EV initiatives, and car purchase incentives (Graham-Rowe et al., 2012; Ahmadi et al., 2015; Bahamonde-Birke and Hanappi, 2016; Coffman et al., 2017; Cherchi, 2017; Han et al., 2017). With the technical difficulty mostly resolved and policy incentives in place, one would expect the penetration rate of BEVs to escalate; yet to date, the targeted market penetration has not been achieved (Kieckhäfer et al., 2017). By the end of 2016, the BEV car market to- taled two million cars—only 2.6% of the global car market (Zhang et al., 2014). In China, the largest BEV market, such vehicles’ market share accounts for approximately 1.8% (Han et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2017a, 2017b). In Norway, where BEVs and HEVs comprise 29% of the new car sales (IEA, 2017), their total joint market share still comprises only 2% of the national car fleet (Bjerkan et al., 2016). Indeed, these vehicles’ unrealized market share expectations reaffirms that https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2019.119815 Received 19 December 2018; Received in revised form 5 September 2019; Accepted 6 November 2019 ⁎ Corresponding author. E-mail address: vblass@tauex.tau.ac.il (V. Blass). Technological Forecasting & Social Change xxx (xxxx) xxxx 0040-1625/ © 2019 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. This is an open access article under the#lictext# license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/#lictextcc#/#licvalue#/). Please cite this article as: Anat Tchetchik, et al., Technological Forecasting & Social Change, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techfore.2019.119815