How buyers’ characteristics influence the clean vehicles market penetrationA case study of spain

Resumen

This paper determines the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of Spanish households that use a clean car (electric or hybrid), with the aim of identifying how these characteristics influence the market penetration of these vehicles. This study is one of the few in the literature that analyses the characteristics of car users based on a broad sample of data, that is representative of 11.5 million Spanish households. The data used are from the Households Budget Survey of the Spanish National Institute of Statistics for the period 2016-2019. The results allow us to identify socioeconomic challenges and opportunities regarding the goal of replacing combustion vehicles with clean vehicles. We find as the main weakness the fact that high-income households (fourth quartile) are 29% more likely to use a clean vehicle than low-income households (first quartile). The strengths are related to features like the gender and age of the household’s main breadwinner: households whose main breadwinner is a male are more likely to use clean vehicles than households whose main breadwinner is a woman, and households whose main breadwinner is over 55 or under 30 years of age are more likely to use one than households with main breadwinners from the rest of the population. These results provide guidelines for a better design of public policies aimed at decarbonizing the transport sector through the replacement of conventional vehicles by clean ones. To do so it is important to consider the features of the social reality in which that objective is to be achieved.