The development of Plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) represents the introduction of an alternative technology into a deeply embedded market—as automobiles and gasoline have been linked to one another through multiple and overlapping cultural, political, and technological developments since the early 1900s. The emergence of a market for PEVs takes place within an existing transportation system based on privately owned individual internal combustion engines that is entrenched in myriad symbolic, material, spatial, and habitual ways, and influences nearly all aspects of social life. This dissertation explores the matrix of political, economic, and cultural elements that combine to create a historically contingent context for the PEV market, and analyzes consumption within this context to offer a case study of consumer behavior in an emerging market. This research uses qualitative data, collected from semi-structured in-depth interviews, group workshops, and focus groups during a three year period, to identify the prevailing qualities consumers attribute to PEVs, and explain how they provide symbolic and functional value for consumers.

This dissertation advances theories of valuation using the PEV market as a case study to illustrate how consumers negotiate value in an emerging industrial market. The author argues that consumers perceive that a given quality (or qualities) of a PEV produces a particular performance which becomes, if viewed as desirable, a source of value. The value an individual consumer derives from the expected performance of a PEV is translated into an amount which they can then compare to the price of the vehicle when deciding whether to make an exchange. PEV drivers make their purchase expecting their vehicle to provide simultaneous performances in their physical state, their social position, and their imaginative world. The author found that the environmental and technological qualities consumers assign to PEVs offer important sources of physical, positional, and symbolic value beyond the financial benefits often assessed in studies of PEV adoption.

The author argues that much of what is valued in the PEV market reflects the broader social values informed by sustainability ideology and the entrenched system of automobility. Moving from explaining sustainability policy narratives to describing dominant trends in analyses of consumers in the PEV market, the researcher found that sustainability discourse, including analyses of pro-environmental behavior, acts as an influential discourse that shapes consumers’ processes of valuation and evaluation of PEVs. In their narratives of (e)valuation, consumers attributed qualities (and subsequently value) to PEVs in ways that reproduced the myths of individual responsibility and technological utopianism based on ideological commitments to sustainability, even as they negotiated the boundaries of both. The relationship between sustainability ideology and PEVs reveals how institutions, ideology, and the socio-historical context of a market shape value creation as much as the interpretive activities of consumers.

Evidence from the early market for plug-in electric vehicles (PEVs) indicates fewer were being purchased (or leased) by women than would be expected based on women’s participation in all new vehicle transactions. The ratio of male-to-female applicants for California’s Clean Vehicle Rebate (CVR) averaged approximately three males for every female from early 2011 to mid-2015; the ratio for all new vehicle transactions is approximately one-to-one. Research on early PEV owners indicated that for their many similarities, females and males talked about their PEVs in ways that suggest female PEV drivers’ experiences may carry less influence to shape the future of PEVs and charging infrastructure than males’. First, there were simply fewer female PEV owners to provide feedback. Second, females were more likely than males to talk about how they adapted to the present capabilities of PEVs while male respondents were more likely to talk about PEVs in terms of testing their limits. For example, female PEV drivers were more likely to talk about how they used the available charging infrastructure; male respondents were more likely to point to where and how to extend infrastructure. This study extends the analysis from early PEV buyers to the population of new-car buyers (of whom the vast majority own gasoline powered internal combustion engine and hybrid electric vehicles (ICEVs and HEVs)) in California. The results presented here are based on data from an on-line survey of new-car buyers in California conducted at the end of 2014 and subsequent inhome interviews with a subset of survey respondents in early 2015. The overall conclusion is that among new-car buyers, female and male respondents share similar distributions of interest in the next new vehicle for their household being a PEV or fuel cell electric vehicle (FCEV). For no electric-drive vehicle type did the male-to-female ratio approach that seen in the actual early market for PEVs. Under conditions that most closely correspond to the availability of incentives at the time of the survey, 22% of males and 21% of females express an interest in a plug-in hybrid electric vehicle (PHEV) (a ratio of 1.05 males for every female) and 12% of males and 10% of females express an interest in a battery electric vehicle (BEV) (ratio of 1.20). The difference is greater for FCEVs for which the ratio is 1.76 males for every female.

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