In this research, we describe an empirical study, which aimed at identifying influencing factors on acceptance of electric vehicles. Understanding individual arguments and to reach a high usage rate of these vehicles in the public and a broad acceptance, the identification of possible prousing motives as well as perceived drawbacks is essential, which would allow a sensitive and individually-tailored communication and information policy. Using an exploratory approach, a questionnaire study was carried out in which participants were requested to indicate the level of acceptance and the intention to use electric cars. The questionnaire items were taken from several focus groups, which had been carried out prior to the questionnaire study. Outcomes show that the traditional car is perceived still as much more comfortable, and receives a high trustfulness in comparison to electric cars. In addition, user diversity in terms of age and gender was found to considerably the perceived benefits and barriers. Female users but also aged persons show a higher level of acceptance, which might be due to their higher environmental consciousness in contrast to male persons and younger participants. Interestingly, the selfreported level of domain knowledge (significantly higher in men) did not show a large influence on the level of acceptance.
Over the last years, public transport has become both more prominent and more diverse. Because of the complex structure of today's public transport networks, an electronic guidance is effectively required. Usually different transport modalities and service providers offer their own application to which the traveler has to adapt after changing between services. Additionally a current trend in mobile applications is the customization of GUI elements which leads to appealing looks but usually also to cluttered presentation of information. Both these problems cause a high cognitive stress on the traveler using the mobile application, especially while conducting other activities at the same time. Our approach to mitigate these issues is to create a mobile application applying the Gamification principle Cascading Information Theory to simplify the usage and additionally to use a back-end which allows to integrate data from various services hereby unifiying the presentation. A prototype of the application was evaluated in an initial user test for comparing our approach to the most popular mobile travel application in Germany.
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