scholarly journals Profiling Spanish Prospective Buyers of Electric Vehicles Based on Demographics

2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (16) ◽  
pp. 9223
Author(s):  
Jose Esteves ◽  
Daniel Alonso-Martínez ◽  
Guillermo de Haro

As traffic congestion and air pollution rise at alarming rates in many cities worldwide, new smart technologies are emerging to meet the urban mobility challenge. In addition, automotive firms have transformed their business models to make them more sustainable and to adjust to demand response. Electric vehicles (EVs) represent a viable option to reduce ecological damage and improve public health. However, in the previous literature, no consensus has been reached on the profile of prospective buyers of EVs. Based on a large-scale sample of Spanish citizens and using cluster analysis, our study provides a better understanding of the demographics of such prospective buyers. We identified four types of EV prospective buyers. Our results show that although men have a strong preference for EVs, low-income older women prove to be the most EV-aware group; their automotive driving experience and concern for sustainability could be among the underlying causes of this particular interest. Another valuable insight is the greater partiality of older people for EVs. These findings have many implications for managers, especially in the automotive industry, policymakers, and sustainability strategists. They show that EV prospective buyers should not be approached as a homogeneous group but as a heterogeneous group with different socio-demographic characteristics that might help decision-makers make better business decisions.

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 70-82
Author(s):  
Soumi Paul ◽  
Paola Peretti ◽  
Saroj Kumar Datta

Building customer relationships and customer equity is the prime concern in today’s business decisions. The emergence of internet, especially social media like Facebook and Twitter, changed traditional marketing thought to a great extent. The importance of customer orientation is reflected in the axiom, “The customer is the king”. A good number of organizations are engaging customers in their new product development activities via social media platforms. Co-creation, a new perspective in which customers are active co-creators of the products they buy and use, is currently challenging the traditional paradigm. The concept of co-creation involving the customer’s knowledge, creativity and judgment to generate value is considered not only an upcoming trend that introduces new products or services but also fitting their need and increasing value for money. Knowledge and innovation are inseparable. Knowledge management competencies and capacities are essential to any organization that aspires to be distinguished and innovative. The present work is an attempt to identify the change in value creation procedure along with one area of business, where co-creation can return significant dividends. It is on extending the brand or brand category through brand extension or line extension. This article, through an in depth literature review analysis, identifies the changes in every perspective of this paradigm shift and it presents a conceptual model of company-customer-brand-based co-creation activity via social media. The main objective is offering an agenda for future research of this emerging trend and ensuring the way to move from theory to practice. The paper acts as a proposal; it allows the organization to go for this change in a large scale and obtain early feedback on the idea presented. 


2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-13 ◽  
Author(s):  
Loretta Lees

Abstract Gentrification is no-longer, if it ever was, a small scale process of urban transformation. Gentrification globally is more often practised as large scale urban redevelopment. It is state-led or state-induced. The results are clear – the displacement and disenfranchisement of low income groups in favour of wealthier in-movers. So, why has gentrification come to dominate policy making worldwide and what can be done about it?


Author(s):  
Yan Pan ◽  
Shining Li ◽  
Qianwu Chen ◽  
Nan Zhang ◽  
Tao Cheng ◽  
...  

Stimulated by the dramatical service demand in the logistics industry, logistics trucks employed in last-mile parcel delivery bring critical public concerns, such as heavy cost burden, traffic congestion and air pollution. Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) are a promising alternative tool in last-mile delivery, which is however limited by insufficient flight range and load capacity. This paper presents an innovative energy-limited logistics UAV schedule approach using crowdsourced buses. Specifically, when one UAV delivers a parcel, it first lands on a crowdsourced social bus to parcel destination, gets recharged by the wireless recharger deployed on the bus, and then flies from the bus to the parcel destination. This novel approach not only increases the delivery range and load capacity of battery-limited UAVs, but is also much more cost-effective and environment-friendly than traditional methods. New challenges therefore emerge as the buses with spatiotemporal mobility become the bottleneck during delivery. By landing on buses, an Energy-Neutral Flight Principle and a delivery scheduling algorithm are proposed for the UAVs. Using the Energy-Neutral Flight Principle, each UAV can plan a flying path without depleting energy given buses with uncertain velocities. Besides, the delivery scheduling algorithm optimizes the delivery time and number of delivered parcels given warehouse location, logistics UAVs, parcel locations and buses. Comprehensive evaluations using a large-scale bus dataset demonstrate the superiority of the innovative logistics UAV schedule approach.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (9) ◽  
pp. 5108
Author(s):  
Navin Ranjan ◽  
Sovit Bhandari ◽  
Pervez Khan ◽  
Youn-Sik Hong ◽  
Hoon Kim

The transportation system, especially the road network, is the backbone of any modern economy. However, with rapid urbanization, the congestion level has surged drastically, causing a direct effect on the quality of urban life, the environment, and the economy. In this paper, we propose (i) an inexpensive and efficient Traffic Congestion Pattern Analysis algorithm based on Image Processing, which identifies the group of roads in a network that suffers from reoccurring congestion; (ii) deep neural network architecture, formed from Convolutional Autoencoder, which learns both spatial and temporal relationships from the sequence of image data to predict the city-wide grid congestion index. Our experiment shows that both algorithms are efficient because the pattern analysis is based on the basic operations of arithmetic, whereas the prediction algorithm outperforms two other deep neural networks (Convolutional Recurrent Autoencoder and ConvLSTM) in terms of large-scale traffic network prediction performance. A case study was conducted on the dataset from Seoul city.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3774
Author(s):  
Pavlos Topalidis ◽  
Cristina Florea ◽  
Esther-Sevil Eigl ◽  
Anton Kurapov ◽  
Carlos Alberto Beltran Leon ◽  
...  

The purpose of the present study was to evaluate the performance of a low-cost commercial smartwatch, the Xiaomi Mi Band (MB), in extracting physical activity and sleep-related measures and show its potential use in addressing questions that require large-scale real-time data and/or intercultural data including low-income countries. We evaluated physical activity and sleep-related measures and discussed the potential application of such devices for large-scale step and sleep data acquisition. To that end, we conducted two separate studies. In Study 1, we evaluated the performance of MB by comparing it to the GT3X (ActiGraph, wGT3X-BT), a scientific actigraph used in research, as well as subjective sleep reports. In Study 2, we distributed the MB across four countries (Austria, Germany, Cuba, and Ukraine) and investigated physical activity and sleep among these countries. The results of Study 1 indicated that MB step counts correlated highly with the scientific GT3X device, but did display biases. In addition, the MB-derived wake-up and total-sleep-times showed high agreement with subjective reports, but partly deviated from GT3X predictions. Study 2 revealed similar MB step counts across countries, but significant later wake-up and bedtimes for Ukraine than the other countries. We hope that our studies will stimulate future large-scale sensor-based physical activity and sleep research studies, including various cultures.


Aerospace ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 38
Author(s):  
Malik Doole ◽  
Joost Ellerbroek ◽  
Victor L. Knoop ◽  
Jacco M. Hoekstra

Large-scale adoption of drone-based delivery in urban areas promise societal benefits with respect to emissions and on-ground traffic congestion, as well as potential cost savings for drone-based logistic companies. However, for this to materialise, the ability of accommodating high volumes of drone traffic in an urban airspace is one of the biggest challenges. For unconstrained airspace, it has been shown that traffic alignment and segmentation can be used to mitigate conflict probability. The current study investigates the application of these principles to a highly constrained airspace. We propose two urban airspace concepts, applying road-based analogies of two-way and one-way streets by imposing horizontal structure. Both of the airspace concepts employ heading-altitude rules to vertically segment cruising traffic according to their travel direction. These airspace configurations also feature transition altitudes to accommodate turning flights that need to decrease the flight speed in order to make safe turns at intersections. While using fast-time simulation experiments, the performance of these airspace concepts is compared and evaluated for multiple traffic demand densities in terms of safety, stability, and efficiency. The results reveal that an effective way to structure drone traffic in a constrained urban area is to have vertically segmented altitude layers with respect to travel direction as well as horizontal constraints imposed to the flow of traffic. The study also makes recommendations for areas of future research, which are aimed at supporting dynamic traffic demand patterns.


Machines ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 71
Author(s):  
Seyed Saeed Madani ◽  
Erik Schaltz ◽  
Søren Knudsen Kær

Lithium-ion batteries are being implemented in different large-scale applications, including aerospace and electric vehicles. For these utilizations, it is essential to improve battery cells with a great life cycle because a battery substitute is costly. For their implementation in real applications, lithium-ion battery cells undergo extension during the course of discharging and charging. To avoid disconnection among battery pack ingredients and deformity during cycling, compacting force is exerted to battery packs in electric vehicles. This research used a mechanical design feature that can address these issues. This investigation exhibits a comprehensive description of the experimental setup that can be used for battery testing under pressure to consider lithium-ion batteries’ safety, which could be employed in electrified transportation. Besides, this investigation strives to demonstrate how exterior force affects a lithium-ion battery cell’s performance and behavior corresponding to static exterior force by monitoring the applied pressure at the dissimilar state of charge. Electrochemical impedance spectroscopy was used as the primary technique for this research. It was concluded that the profiles of the achieved spectrums from the experiments seem entirely dissimilar in comparison with the cases without external pressure. By employing electrochemical impedance spectroscopy, it was noticed that the pure ohmic resistance, which is related to ion transport resistance of the separator, could substantially result in the corresponding resistance increase.


Agriculture ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 86
Author(s):  
Youzhu Li ◽  
Rui He ◽  
Jinsi Liu ◽  
Chongguang Li ◽  
Jason Xiong

To ease the fluctuation of hog prices and maintain the hog market’s stability, the central government of China has issued a series of hog price control policies. This paper, supplemented by co-word analysis and LDA thematic modeling, constructed 9 first-level indicators and 36 s-level indicators and used a PMC index model to conduct quantitative research on the selected 74 policies and regulations of China’s pig price regulation policies from July 2007 to April 2020. The research concludes that the research tool system of China’s hog price control is formed. The overall design of the hog price control policy is relatively reasonable, but there are still the following problems: the subject of China’s pig price control policy is singular, so it is difficult to form a resultant force; the policy pays attention to the price regulation in the short term, but ignores the long-term industrial structure adjustment; it emphasizes market supervision, but insufficient support for slaughtering and processing; it focuses on production and management to improve the development quality and efficiency of the pig industry, but does not take social equity into account. Finally, some policy suggestions are put forward: multi-department division of labor and close cooperation; adjusting the industrial structure of hog and carrying out appropriate large-scale breeding; establishing the operation mode of slaughtering and processing in the producing area to reduce the circulation cost of the pig industry; ensuring the consumption of pork by low-income groups and giving consideration to social efficiency and equity.


2021 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nana O. Bonsu

AbstractThe UK Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution aims to ban petrol and diesel cars by 2030 and transition to electric vehicles (EVs). Current business models for EV ownership and the transition to net-net zero emissions are not working for households in the lowest income brackets. However, low-income communities bear the brunt of environmental and health illnesses from transport air pollution caused by those living in relatively more affluent areas. Importantly, achieving equitable EV ownership amongst low-and middle-income households and driving policy goals towards environmental injustice of air pollution and net-zero emissions would require responsible and circular business models. Such consumer-focused business models address an EV subscription via low-income household tax rebates, an EV battery value-chain circularity, locally-driven new battery technological development, including EV manufacturing tax rebates and socially innovative mechanisms. This brief communication emphasises that consumer-led business models following net-zero emission vehicles shift and decisions must ensure positive-sum outcomes. And must focus not only on profits and competitiveness but also on people, planet, prosperity and partnership co-benefits.


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