UCTC 2006 Student Research Conference

Surveying Projects in Shanghai and Sacramento Aim to Unearth How and Why Consumers Decide to Buy Cars and What Kind They Chose to Buy

• Jason Ni, UC Davis Transportation Ph.D. candidate
• Bradley Flamm, UC Berkeley Transportation Ph.D. candidate

The Riddle of Shanghai: Why Car Ownership Is So Low and Whether Lessons Can Be Used Elsewhere

China has only recently begun the motorization process, but it is proceeding rapidly, and with a population of 1.3 billion people, their decisions about whether to buy a car, and, if so, what kind they buy will have a tremendous effect on the country’s energy requirements and environment. Jason Ni, a UC Davis transportation Ph.D. candidate is examining three aspects of this question: market segmentation, what motivates motorization, and how vehicle purchase decisions are made.

Ni is basing his study in Shanghai. He chose that city for three reasons: it is the wealthiest city in China, and therefore its residents have enough money to choose different types of vehicles; it is diverse, which allows Ni to study market segmentation; and it has low car-ownership, which means that although many people can afford to buy a car, they don’t. This last fact especially interested Ni, as numerous studies over the past three decades have indicated that rising personal income is strongly associated with increasing motor vehicle purchases in aggregate (e.g. on a national level). Why, he wondered, was this not the case in Shanghai?

But the first step of his project was to determine whether the type of survey research common in the United States would work in China. Ni joked with his UCTC audience that after his first experience surveying residents he had re-titled his project “Lost in Translation.” Working with Chinese university students, he learned that a six-page survey is too long, that rewarding those who bothered to answer his survey with a Tongji University sports cap (worth about 60 cents) didn’t work too well, and that Shanghai police take a dim view of foreigners asking questions without a letter from the government.

He also discovered that people eating lunch in a food court or enjoying an afternoon coffee break at Starbucks were more often willing to be surveyed than people on the street or in a mall, and that single women were more willing to talk than middle-aged businessmen. With these and other lessons under his belt, Ni is returning to Shanghai over the summer to continue his research.

Ni has hypothesized that there are five population segments in China. The “new rich” include young, wealthy, well-educated people who are brand seekers, as well as young, so-called “transitioners” who are eager to change their lifestyle as well as the society around them. The second group draws from the traditional upper class, which Ni calls the “old rich,” people who possessed political power and wealth earlier than the new rich group (e.g. before the economic reform of China), but who are also status-seekers.

The third group includes the working poor and the salaried class. They comprise 75 percent of the population, and unlike the first two groups who are more likely to buy a status vehicle, they are more likely to purchase an inexpensive utilitarian vehicle for work. The fourth group is the “native Shanghainese” who are sometimes considered by other Chinese to be “pretentious and arrogant.” They, too, tend to be status-seekers. The last group consists of those who live in the newer suburbs where public transportation is often not easily accessible.

On his return to Shanghai, Ni hopes to learn more about these groups, which will offer valuable clues to the patterns and motivations of car-buying in China in coming years.

As for the survey, Ni planned more sophisticated methods for collecting information: he hoped to use text messages via cell phones to recruit those interested in participating, as well as working with the local Ford China dealership. Finally, he planned to get an authorization letter from the government.

Sacramento Survey Findings Suggest that When It Comes to the Environment, the Heart Matters More than the Head

In the summer of 2003 angry environmentalists torched 20 Hummers at four southern California car dealerships. Bradley Flamm, a transportation Ph.D. candidate at UC Berkeley, was listening to a news radio broadcast about the incident when a woman called the station to say it was possible to be both environmentally conscious and drive a Hummer. She knew because she was—on both accounts. That statement made Flamm wonder whether knowledge  about environmental issues actually had any effect on a car-buyer’s choice of vehicle.

Since the mid-1970s pollsters have taken the pulse of Americans’ attitudes toward environmental quality versus economic growth, and a majority has consistently said that protecting the natural environment is worth it, even if there are economic costs involved. Over the past 35 years, however, vehicle-miles and person-miles per capita have nearly doubled, average occupancy in vehicles has decreased, and people are carpooling and using public transit less. So although the average car gets better mileage than it did in the 1970s, people are still consuming more oil for transportation in cars and light-duty trucks.

“Are people who say they have pro-environmental attitudes trying to minimize the impact of their vehicle use?” Flamm wondered. “Are they owning fewer cars? Are they owning more cars but driving them less? Are they driving more fuel-efficient cars?”

To find out, he conducted a survey of 4,000 households in the Sacramento region to learn more about the relationship between environmental knowledge and attitudes toward vehicle use and fuel consumption.

To better understand what is going on, Flamm posed these research questions: Do people who have strong pro-environmental attitudes own fewer cars? Own more fuel-efficient cars? Drive less? To conduct his research, Flamm turned to a conceptual model, a Knowledge-Attitudes-Behavior (or K-A-B) framework, more commonly used in the field of public health research. In research about AIDS, smoking, or excess alcohol usage, public health researchers are trying to learn what kind of information might alter attitudes and behaviors.

“There have been a few studies that have tried to look at either knowledge or attitudes or in some cases combining them, but with measures of travel behavior that I didn’t think were refined and accurate enough," Flamm says.

“Vehicle ownership is really where the average American’s largest environmental impact from their travel comes from. And transportation as a category is as important as any other category of consumption by the average American. So it seemed important to understand how their attitudes and knowledge about the environment are affecting their vehicle ownership and use.”

In February, when Flamm made his presentation at the UCTC conference, he had completed his data collection, but had just begun his statistical analysis.

“What I presented were really what I call difference of means analyses: If you say you care about protecting the environment, what’s your average vehicle ownership, what’s the fuel efficiency of your cars, what’s your average number of vehicle miles—versus people who said the opposite—that protecting the environment is not important.”

After the conference he controlled for additional variables—income, education and household membership.

He came to three conclusions:

That knowledge and attitudes are strongly related to each other. In other words, people who say they care about protecting the environment know more about the environmental impacts of vehicle ownership and use.

However, knowledge is only statistically related to vehicle type fuel efficiency—not to the number of cars an individual owns or how much they’re driven. Put another way, the households of people who know more about the environmental impacts of vehicle ownership and use, on average, are buying vehicles that are more fuel-efficient than the households of people who know less about such environmental impacts.

And finally, pro-environmental attitudes are correlated to owning fewer and more fuel-efficient vehicles at the household level, driving fewer miles annually, and, consequently, consuming significantly less fuel.

As Flamm puts it, it seems in some ways that your heart matters more than your head does in terms of the environmental impacts of vehicle ownership.