Demand Analysis and Forecasting of Battery Electric Vehicles in Korea

Along with the South Korean government’s efforts to increase the supply of electric vehicles (EV) in the market, the sales of EV have risen from 66 in 2010 to 34,162 in 2019. This research aims to discover the key factors that drive the demand of EV in Korea, excluding the government’s incentives and environmental regulations. Throughout the analysis, three major factors have been found, which are cumulative number of EV charging station, number of news reports that include the keyword ‘electric car’ and ‘electric vehicle’, and mid and long-term trend of the after-tax gasoline prices that base on the past two months’ prices. Moreover, a demand forecasting model was built and the feature importance of the variables was calculated. The cumulative number of charging station showed .56, the number of news reports showed .34, and the mid and long-term trend of gasoline price showed .11 of the feature importance.