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Electric vehicles are an important instrument to decarbonize transportation, offering a range of cobenefits such as reductions in local pollution, noise emissions, and oil dependency. Unfortunately, price, range, infrastructure and technological uncertainty are only some of the barriers to a faster adoption of these vehicles. To overcome these barriers, there is a broad call for public support and a growing body of primarily survey and choice experiment studies to show which policy mechanisms are effective, with mixed outcomes. In response, this paper offers a qualitative comparative analysis that draws on 227 semi-structured interviews with 257 transportation and electricity experts from 201 institutions across 17 cities within the Nordic region to discuss the reasoning and arguments behind EV incentives and policy mechanisms. A frequency analysis of the most coded responses favoured cost reduction mechanisms, in particular taxation exemptions; infrastructure support for public and apartment charging; the importance of consumer awareness, especially information campaigns; certain other specific policy measures like procurement programs and environmental zones; and more general policy principles. More in-depth, our analysis shows the debates around these mechanisms and how the pros and cons of these mechanisms differ per country, per transport segment, per phase of transition or market share, even per city. In short, this paper calls for strong stable national targets and price incentives combined with local flexibility to implement secondary benefits and more attention to awareness campaigns to advance the implementation of electric vehicles.

Range anxiety," defined as the psychological anxiety a consumer experiences in response to the limited range of an electric vehicle, continues to be labelled and presented as one of the most pressing barriers to their mainstream diffusion. As a result, academia, policymakers and even industry have focused on addressing the range anxiety barrier in order to accelerate adoption. Much literature recognizes that range anxiety is increasingly psychological, rather than technical, in its nature. However, we argue in this paper that even psychological and technical explanations are incomplete. We examine range anxiety through Hirschman's Rhetoric of Reaction, which supposes that conservative forces may oppose change by propagating theses related to jeopardy, perversity, and futility. To do so, we use three qualitative methods to understand the role of range anxiety triangulated via a variety of perspectives: 227 semi-structured interviews with experts at 201 institutions, a survey with nearly 5,000 respondents, and 8 focus groups, all across 17 cities in the five Nordic countries. We find evidence where consumers and experts use and perpetuate the rhetoric of reaction, particularly the jeopardy thesis. We conclude with a reexamination of the policies geared to assuage range-based barriers, which a construction of range anxiety as a rhetorical excuse would render as ineffective or inefficient, as well as future implications for diffusion theory.