Investigating Electric Cars Charging Behaviour in Italian Urban Areas

One of the most relevant factors for the widespread adoption of battery electric vehicles is an effective recharge infrastructure, in terms of location, power and costs for users. This is an ambitious objective mainly in urban areas, where recharge networks can assume diverse alternative configurations. In such contexts, private and public infrastructure can overlap or have deficiencies, causing investment waste or supply shortages. Generally, surveys are powerful tools for investigating demand preferences and guiding offer development, mainly at its early stages. In Italy, electric mobility struggles to catch on, so we considered it useful to investigate Italian attitudes toward electric car recharging. With this aim, we carried out a first survey addressed to electric car early adopters, performed with the Revealed Preferences technique, and a second one addressed to potential electric car users, set on the Stated Preferences technique. Both surveys were mainly focused on urban context and daily mobility, with special attention on the choice of recharge location with respect to the stopping places (home, work, other destinations). This paper describes only the Stated Preference survey, which is more significant for the setting up and calibration of a behavioral model on electric car recharge in urban areas. Results on the representativeness of the sample are reported, as well as the charging behaviour expressed in different situations of battery level, recharge time, and costs.