What EV users say about policy efficacy: Evidence from Shanghai

Sustainable EV adoption is critical to urban low-carbon future. The in-depth analysis of urban incentives' role in encouraging EV purchases is less examined. The perspectives of EV adopters can provide unique insights into policy implementation and effectiveness, informing future policy design and learning. Taking Shanghai—a city with roughly 4% of global EV stock—as the case, we aim to fill the above gaps via an online survey among existing EV owners. Our analysis shows that (a) urban EV strategies played a critical role in Shanghai's early adoption success, encouraging many first-time buyers to choose EVs over petrol cars, avoiding future lock-in emissions; (b) locally tailored measures such as free license plates and access to highways during rush hours significantly encouraged EV purchases; and (c) users' feedback on policy implementation reveals challenges for next-step scale adoption, especially regarding an unsupportive installation environment for private chargers, and inadequate services, e.g., infrastructure maintenance and the building up of a used-car market. These findings suggest city-level incentives can increase EV uptake but are insufficient to support a complete EV transition. Research needs to look beyond incentives for early adopters and into policy and social aspects that can support upscaling and social embedding of EVs.