Gas anxiety and the charging choices of plug-in hybrid electric vehicle drivers

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) can provide many of the benefits of battery electric vehicles (BEVs), such as reduced petroleum consumption and greenhouse gas emissions, without the “range anxiety” that can accompany driving a vehicle with limited range when there are few charging opportunities. However, evidence indicates that PHEVs are often plugged in more frequently than BEVs in practice. This is somewhat paradoxical: drivers for whom plugging in is optional tend to do so more frequently than those for whom it is necessary. This has led to the coining of a new term – “gas anxiety” – to describe the apparent desire of PHEV drivers to avoid using gasoline. In this paper, we analyze the variables influencing the charging choices of PHEV owners, testing whether drivers express preferences consistent with the concept of gas anxiety. We analyze data collected in a web-based stated preference survey using a latent class logit model. The results reveal two classes of decision-making patterns among the survey respondents: (1) those who weight the cost of gasoline and the cost of recharging approximately equally (the cost-minimizing class), and (2) those who weight the cost gasoline more heavily than the cost of recharging (the gas anxiety class). Respondents in the gas anxiety class expressed a willingness to recharge at a charging station even when doing so would cost approximately four times as much as the cost of the gasoline avoided. While the gas anxiety class represents the majority of our sample, more recent PHEV adopters are more likely to be in the cost-minimizing class. Looking forward, this suggests that public charging station operators may need to price charging competitively with gasoline on a per-mile basis to attract PHEV owners.