Awareness, persuasion, and willingness to purchase: a study on taxi drivers’ preferences to consider alternative fuel vehicles

Although developing non-fossil fuel vehicles supports sustainable urban transportation, their impact on air pollution and energy consumption depends on awareness of this technology. Aging fleets of Fossil Fuel Taxis (FFTs) cause environmental degradation, which replacing FFTs with Alternative Fuel Taxis (AFTs) mitigates. This study presents a novel framework investigating how personality and communication characteristics and taxi drivers’ knowledge of Alternative Fuel Vehicles (AFVs) shape awareness. It models awareness, persuasion, and willingness to purchase AFTs using partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). Based on 506 face-to-face Tehran taxi-driver interviews, PLS-SEM shows personality, communication characteristics, and AFV knowledge drive awareness with weights of 0.573, 0.627, and 0.168, respectively. Awareness affects persuasion, while persuasion strongly predicts willingness to purchase, explaining 51.4% of its variance; awareness explains 11.6% of persuasion variance. Pro-AFT policies providing ownership facilities and granting access permission to restricted city areas were examined as moderators, revealing differences across policy-support groups.