The Japanese governmental subsidy for purchasing
environmentally friendly vehicles, on which we
put focus in this paper, had started from April 2009
and halted in September 2010. The results of this
paper indicate that it is true the current subsidy has
played an important role to raise awareness of EVs,
especially HEVs. However, in order to improve
environment by diffusing other kinds of EVs that
have higher environmental performance than
HEVs, not only the commercialisation of those
kinds of vehicles that satisfy consumer needs at
acceptable vehicle price levels but also further preferential treatment schemes should be
required to gain consumer recognition especially
for BEVs and PHEVs