How do people value electric vehicle charging service? A gamified survey approach

Electric vehicles (EVs) are currently the most promising technology with the potential to transform transportation and energy landscapes to make industry and society more sustainable. Although their adoption has been much faster than anticipated a few years ago, resulting in a significant increase from 400,000 EVs sold in 2013 to more than 3 million in 2017, the coming years will be crucial for determining whether EVs are to become a new transportation industry “standard”, the role of which has been held by internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles over the last hundred years. Not only will innovation in EV batteries determine a “win” or “fail” for EVs, but a significant role in its acceptance will be successful development of a comprehensive EV eco-system, establishing an efficient network of EV chargers as well as attractive and affordable charging tariffs. Furthermore, having insight as to how much money EV users are willing to pay for the charging service (i.e., willingness to pay) in various circumstances is one of the essential factors in building a successful EV eco-system. That being said, this paper utilizes a gamified survey for exploring a person's willingness to pay for EV charging. The experimental setup includes both the classic (text-only) questionnaire, as well as the game-based questionnaire. Therefore, not only have interesting insights on the willingness to pay for EV charging been identified, but analysis of user experience analysis from the questionnaires suggests that use of gamification is a good approach to performing a survey as it exhibits superior hedonic quality in comparison to classic methods (i.e., text-only questionnaire).