TRB Annual Meeting 2025
Date:
Abstract: Understanding the experiences and attitudes of electric vehicle (EV) owners is crucial for driving EV sales and thus promoting a sustainable environment. Previous studies have used costly and inflexible crowdsourced questionnaires to assess EV owner satisfaction. This study adopts an innovative approach by analyzing 41 h of video interviews with 2101 EV owners from a short video platform. Utilizing the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) model, topics of concern for EV owners were identified, followed by sentiment analysis supported by a large language model (LLM) and random forest model. The results indicate that 1) “After-sales & Brand (19.75 %),” “Performance Experience (25.63 %),” “Functionality & Comfort (31.76 %),” and “Car Cost (22.86 %)” are the four main concerns of EV owners. Notably, concern for car costs is rising, while after-sales service is decreasing. 2) While EV ownership is mostly male, female owners exhibit a higher percentage of positive sentiment, with 47.16 % compared to 36.81 % for male owners. 3) “Functionality & Comfort” is the key satisfaction factor for both genders, then women prioritizing “After-sales and Brand” and men prioritizing “Performance Experience” as secondary concerns. This study proposes a new research framework and empirical case based on short-video data, offering valuable insights for potential consumers and automakers.
Keywords: New energy vehicle; TikTok; Nature language processing (NLP); Topic modeling; User satisfaction