Accelerating the Deployment of Electric Light Vehicles for Sustainable Urban Mobility: A Harmonized Pilot Demonstration Methodology

The development of sustainable, smart mobility has been accelerated by the arrival of innovative technologies. With the paradigm shift towards transport electrification, Electric Light Vehicles (EL-Vs) represent a very promising pathway to smart urban mobility. Still, the current market penetration of EL-Vs is relatively low compared to that of conventional vehicles. Via one-year long demonstrations of such vehicles in six different European cities (Rome, Genoa, Bari, Málaga, Trikala and Berlin) ELVITEN EU funded project proposes a holistic approach to boost the EL-Vs usage by addressing all of the issues hindering the wide market penetration of EL-Vs, which are the Users’ Low Awareness, the Consumers’ Concerns and the Inadequate Mobility Planning for EL-Vs. This paper presents the harmonized, user-centered, controlled, step-by-step methodology that has been followed in order to prepare and set up the pilot in each City, to create awareness among users and to collect and analyse data from the different Cities so that the findings can be comparable and thus being able to derive recommendations and guidelines to accelerate the deployment of EL-Vs in complex and demanding urban environments. The demonstration activities target the collection of appropriate sizes of various types of data, based on the methodological triangulation concept and a blended qualitative and quantitative study approach, in order to increase the credibility and validity of the results.