Abstract for: Citizens’ Choice: Modeling long term technology transition in the automobile industry

The transformation process towards sustainable road transportation implicitly requires that household’s car choice is not only influenced by individual or household specific objectives but also by societal objectives such as mitigating climate change. Hence the car purchase decision is seen as a citizen choice process, also including societal and ecological aspects in the decision function. The automobile industry is already in the process of changing its research and development paradigm towards energy-efficient drive-train technologies – but the process of how and how fast citizens will respond to this paradigm change is still unclear. Based on theoretical and empirical evidence the paper suggests firstly, a conceptual technology transition framework explaining changes in citizens’ choice process. The framework highlights why traditional choice models (such as logit models) may not be able to simulate the transformation process towards sustainable road transportation correctly. Secondly, a simple dynamic choice structure will be suggested that is able to simulate nonlinear change in citizens’ car choice pattern.