The choice of battery electric vehicles for urban logistics: a conjoint based choice analysis

European cities have to face new important challenges given the objective of reaching CO2-free city logistics in major urban centres by 2030. In that context, battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are considered as a promising technology by the authorities. Still, sales for electric freight vehicles remain today limited. More attention to transport companies is therefore needed, in particular to the way they value BEVs.
This paper investigates the choice behaviour of transport companies by means of a conjoint based choice experiment. In each choice task, we presented to the respondents three different vehicles described by a common set of attributes: volume of the vehicle, the purchase costs, the running costs, the range, the charging/refuelling time and the ecoscore of the vehicle. After contacting all the relevant transport companies located in the Brussels Capital Region, we collected 320 choice tasks completed. Based on that sample, a Hierarchical Bayes estimation gave individual utilities for each respondent. However, the goodness of fit of the model was assessed to be below average. As a result, the estimated utilities of some attributes were not always consistent. Still the results presented in the paper can give first insights on the preferences of transport companies for electric vehicles.
The environmental performance of the electric vehicle is observed to have a limited influence on the transporters. The most important advantage of the electric vehicle is their low running costs. Still, the utility of the electric vehicle is entailed by its high purchase cost. But the most important disadvantage of the electric vehicle according transporters is the limited range. Finally, charging operations were not seen as a barrier if fast charging is available at the depot.