6. CONCLUSIONS
The aim of this research work is to explore the psychological determinants influencing an
individual’s intention to purchase an electric vehicle (EV). The literature review section of the
paper demonstrates that many researchers have been working on the factors that affect vehicle
purchase intentions using various research methods and methodologies. However, very few
results have reported on the effects of attitudinal factors in the Japanese context. The approach
adopted in this study (of using MIMIC and a latent-class NL model) is similar to other
empirical ones, but we use a different dataset so as to model latent variables in the context of
EV purchase intention. Specifically for the step of latent-class analysis, and differing from
most other empirical studies in which sociodemographic traits are taken as significant
segmentation variables (Bhat, 1997; Walker and Li, 2007), we defined our own model
specifications using latent variables (automobile dependency) in the membership model. In
addition, unlike the common division of an auto market into groups of consumers who are
“EV buyers” and “non EV buyers”, we divided it into homogenous groups of consumers
based on their willingness to increase their current household car ownership. This identifies a
further difference between two groups of potential EV buyers – those would increase current
household car ownership by buying an EV as an additional car and those would replace the
current car with an EV, so not increasing ownership