Extending TAM-UTAUT with Range Anxiety, Charging Infrastructure Access, and FAME-III Policy Awareness as Moderating Constructs

India’s electric vehicle transition has accelerated sharply since the launch of the FAME-III scheme in 2024, with domestic two-wheeler and passenger car EV sales registering compound annual growth exceeding forty percent; yet aggregate EV penetration as a share of total new vehicle registrations remains below nine percent in even the most progressive states, revealing a pronounced intention-behaviour gap that existing adoption research — dominated by Western samples and pre-infrastructure-buildout contexts — has inadequately explained. This study applies an extended Technology Acceptance Model integrated with Unified Theory of Acceptance and Use of Technology (TAM-UTAUT) constructs to survey data from 1,684 prospective vehicle purchasers across Tier-1, Tier-2, and Tier-3 Indian cities, incorporating range anxiety and charging infrastructure access as contextually salient barriers alongside FAME-III policy awareness as a moderator of the performance expectancy-to-purchase-intention relationship, and finds that the model explains substantially more variance in EV purchase intention than standard TAM formulations, with state-level differences in infrastructure score and policy implementation quality emerging as the primary predictors of gap between expressed intention and projected adoption behaviour.