Adoption of alternative fuel vehicles in the Netherlands

Today, several Western European nations are considering to reform their tax systems in order to reach a sustainable and just society. This process takes a lot of time and is subject to many complexities and uncertainties. Well-designed systemic policies may accelerate this process substantially. In this paper we investigate the effectiveness of alternative policies to accelerate the adoption of alternative fuel vehicles in the Netherlands. Recent insights in the Dutch vehicle market suggest the need for a better understanding of the environmental and financial effects of different policy alternatives across all sorts of uncertain developments in vehicle and infrastructure technology, alternative fuel availability and choice behavior. In this paper, we assess the robustness of alternative policies across parametric uncertainties, but also across structural and model uncertainties. In order to do so, we construct two system dynamics choice models to include assumptions of utility maximization as well as regret minimization – which, according to the literature, could result in very different levels of adoption. We then use these methods to test the current alternative fuel vehicles policy, a recently proposed alternative, and a closed-loop alternative.