ADOPT: A Historically Validated Light Duty Vehicle Consumer Choice Model

Abstract

The Automotive Deployment Options Projection Tool (ADOPT) is a light-duty vehicle consumer choice and stock model supported by the U.S. Department of Energy's Vehicle Technologies Office. It estimates technology improvement impacts on future U.S. light-duty vehicles sales, petroleum use, and greenhouse gas emissions. ADOPT uses techniques from the multinomial logit method and the mixed logit method to estimate vehicle sales. Specifically, it estimate sales based on the weighted value of key attributes including vehicle price, fuel cost, acceleration, range and usable volume. The average importance of several attributes changes nonlinearly across its range and changes with income. For several attributes, a distribution of importance around the average value is used to represent consumer heterogeneity. The majority of existing vehicle makes, models, and trims are included to fully represent the market. The Corporate Average Fuel Economy regulations are enforced. The sales feed into the ADOPT stock model. It captures key aspects for summing petroleum use and greenhouse gas emissions. This includes capturing the change in vehicle miles traveled by vehicle age, the creation of new model options based on the success of existing vehicles, new vehicle option introduction rate limits, and survival rates by vehicle age. ADOPT has been extensively validated with historical sales data. It matches in key dimensions including sales by fuel economy, acceleration, price, vehicle size class, and powertrain across multiple years. A graphical user interface provides easy and efficient use. It manages the inputs, simulation, and results.

National Economic Value Assessment of Plug-in Electric Vehicles: Volume I

“…A second important assumption is the imposition of a perceived consumer cost penalty for the limited range of BEVs, based upon the all-electric range of the BEV. This penalty is based upon statistical analysis of historical vehicle purchases and is consistent with some stated preference survey results (Brooker et al 2015;Helveston et al 2015).…”

“…A more complete and dynamic modeling of consumer preferences would be required to more fully understand the relative benefits across different PEV types and drivetrains. These types of models have been developed by DOE and continue to be refined and improved as new market data on consumer preferences for advanced LDVs and PEVs becomes available (NRC 2013;Stephens et al 2016;Brooker et al 2015). The framework established in the present study to account for household travel patterns, climate, and regional variations in gasoline prices and grid simulations would still prove valuable in the implementation of a more sophisticated vehicle choice modeling approach.…”

Scenario Evaluation and Regionalization Analysis (SERA) Model: Demand Side and Refueling Infrastructure Buildout

“…Figure 2 illustrates inputs and outputs of the SERA vehicle stock model. Input sources could include market share results from prescriptive studies or detailed vehicle choice models (e.g., the Automotive Deployment Options Projection Tool, ADOPT [Brooker et al 2015]) and attributes of exogenous scenarios used to explore alternative transportation futures (e.g., total vehicles sold per year). Specific inputs include the following (for more details please refer to http://nrel.github.io/sera/sera-manual.html):…”

“…where AV is the area's number of sales of advanced vehicles (hybrid electric vehicles, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, and battery electric vehicles), LV is the area's number of sales of luxury vehicles, 1 and HI is the number of households with annual income greater than $100,000 (70 th percentile of households) (U.S. Census 2017). The selection and weighting of these three factors is based on NREL's experience with vehicle-choice data and modeling (Brooker et al 2015;Melaina, Bremson, and Solo 2012;Melaina 2009) and consultation with industry experts.…”

High-Octane Mid-Level Ethanol Blend Market Assessment

“…The ADOPT model is an LDV consumer choice and stock model developed at NREL and supported by the DOE Vehicle Technologies Office. It estimates technology improvement impacts on U.S. LDV sales, petroleum use, and GHG emissions (Brooker et al 2015).…”