MAPPING THE VOID IN ELECTRIC VEHICLE (EV) ADOPTION RESEARCH: UNCOVERING LACK OF SOCIO-ECONOMIC STUDY IN THE GLOBAL SOUTH

Electric Vehicles (EVs) are considered an effective contemporary alternative to Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) vehicles. Research in the domain of EV is being conducted globally across a variety of fields; among them, our study explored research on consumer adoption. Going through the bibliometric analysis of the data taken from the Scopus database, what came to our attention is the minimal amount of work that is done on understanding consumers of EVs. From the literature, we found that consumer preferences are shaped through the influence of several parameters related to EVs, and this influence varies according to the consumer’s socio-economic and demographic characteristics. From the keyword analysis, the occurrence of keywords such as socio-economic conditions, demography, and consumer segmentation was found to be negligible, and therefore, from our study, we were able to highlight the relevance of understanding consumers’ socio-economic and demographic characteristics before formulating EV policies, especially in regions belonging to the global south.