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The purpose of this paper is to understand consumer preferences concerning electric vehicles (EV) in Portugal, based on comparisons with other vehicles with different powertrains.

The analysis incorporated two survey-based approaches: choice-based conjoint analysis (CBC) and multicriteria decision analysis (MCDA) based. The survey interviewed 252 respondents. The criteria characterizing each vehicle are purchase price, range, fuel consumption and CO₂ emissions. Another criterion was added to verify the potential of EV privileges to influence consumer preferences. A sensitivity analysis on the influence of purchase price and fuel price in the global utility of the vehicles was performed.

The results showed that monetary criteria are those influencing vehicle purchase decisions the most, whereas the existence of privileges for EV owners has little relevance. EV are chosen by the consumer only if their price decreases or if gasoline and diesel prices increase sharply. The position of PHEV in the rankings makes the promotion of this type of vehicle an interesting path to exploit as potential intermediates to the diffusion of EV.

The results underline the need of improving technical barriers of EV that are responsible for consumers’ relevant concerns and that a price subsidy could eventually be effective to increase EV sales at its current market price.

This study compares a wide range of vehicles (conventional, hybrid and electric), addresses the Portuguese market and proposes an MCDA-based approach to obtain preference information, which is compared with a CBC approach.