pacific nw transportation consortium region 10 Pactrans

Organized by

The Pacific Northwest Transportation Consortium (PacTrans)
USDOT University Transportation Center for Federal Region 10

Presentation Title

The Effect of Government Policy on the Promotion of Energy Efficient Vehicles

Abstract

A wide range of government policies have been implemented around the world to increase demand for energy efficient vehicles (EEVs) including cash rebates, reduced sales taxes, registration fee waivers, and toll road exemptions. Despite these efforts, the available literature analyzing the effects of these incentive policies on EEV demand is quite limited.  Further complicating matter is that EEV marketplaces are dynamic, and sales prices of EEVs may fluctuate in response to government incentives, since increase demand can influence market forces to in turn increase EEV prices. A comprehensive analysis that examines the influence of EEV policies on market demand, therefore, must account for possible endogeneity between market demand and sales prices.  In this presentation, I examine and estimate the effects of different types of government incentives on both EEV demand (market and fleet penetration), and EEV price premiums across 15 metropolitan regions from 2008 to 2012. Using error components three stage least squares, I dis-entangle the endogeneity between EEV demand and price, and quantify the effects of a variety of additional factors that influence both price and demand including inflation rates, population density, and fuel costs. Up-front one-time subsidies such as cash rebates increase EEV market penetration by 1.4% and fleet penetration by 0.3%, however, unlike other types of incentives, also lead to 11.3% higher price premiums.

Speaker

Dr. Simon Washington Professor Washington holds the ASTRA Chair at the Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia. He contributes to the fields of behavioural econometrics in transport safety and risk analysis, urban planning, evaluation, and travel behaviour. He is Associate Editor of two leading international transport journals (Journal of Sustainable Transport; and the J of Anal Meth in Acc Res), Editorial Board Member of four leading international journals (Acc Anal & Prev,Trans Res A and C, and the J Trans& Stat). He has authored or co-authored over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles and conference proceedings, a 2ndedition of a textbook adopted in over 20 countries (1000+ citations), and 6 book chapters. His work has been cited by more than 4000 other transport researchers. He has been lead CI on $28 Million on externally supported research and has secured nationally competitive Australian research grants from the Australian Research Council, the National Health and Medical Research Council, and Cooperative Research Centres programs, and in the US including the US National Academy of Sciences, the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (US), and the Federal Highway Administration (US). Prior to joining QUT he served on the faculties of UC Berkeley, Arizona State University, the University of Arizona, and the Georgia Institute of Technology.