Introduction

Right product, wrong place or time lead to disastrous results. Segway is a classic example of this phenomenon. After spending about $100 million on the development and expecting around 10,000 units per week and $1 billion sales, they ended up selling merely 24,000 units in 5 years. With an average price of $5500, they made $132 million sales in 5 years. Why did this happen? Segway believed that if a product is in the market, someone will buy it. That’s not how human psychology works. Their price point was too high and technology not appropriate for the time (It was during 2008-2009 recession!).

To avoid similar fate determining potential areas to expand businesses is fundamental to business strategy. There are various factors that play a role in the success of a product. A brilliant product launched or sold in a non relevant market can be a major flop. Product launches include everything from designing the product, manufacturing it, competition analysis, generate interest, be able to support growth and continuous marketing. A blunder in either parts of the process or even wrong questions early on in the process could result in huge failure. Even massive giants such as CocaCola have met this fate, where a $50 million advertising campaign for CocaCola C2 couldn’t do the trick.

The goal here is to focus on a product of choice, which in this case is Electric Vehicles. It’s known that the US aims for 50% of vehicles on the road to be Electric Vehicles by 2030. When the government gets involved, it’s serious and legit. This is proof of success of Electric Vehicles and the Figure below supports that claim.

When considering what might affect the growth and accelerated adoption of electric vehicles, there are several economic, social and financial factor one might need to consider. There are some states where electric vehicles are widely accepted due to increased exposure to technology wehreas in some states this is due to increased fuel prices. Through this project it will be found what factors can be used to determine whether a particular state in a particular year can be expected to be the next hub of electric vehicles. What would the percentage of electric vehicles be in those states in those years. Data about a state’s GDP, educational level, working population, electricity prices, number of charging ports, number of jobs, total number of vehicles on the road, and more was used to determine which factors explained the increase of electric vehicle adoption. From the data collected it can be seen that there is a general upward trend in the percentage of electric vehicles in each state.

It was found from several analysis that state’s with a larger percentage of individuals with a bachelor’s degree had higher number of electric vehicles. The data available for number of registration in each state was poor. This caused creation of synthetic data for the analysis. Hence Some other questions that were answered during this project include:

1. While Electric Vehicles are successful in the United States, is it safe to say they are equally successful in each state?
   • This is not true. Some states are adopting electric vehicles at a much higher rate than others, this can be seen clearly in Fig 2.
2. What factors affect the increased adoption of electric vehicles in the states?
   • High GDP, High percentage of population with a bachelors degree, high number of jobs, low energy consumption per working population, high median income had very strong associations with high percentage of electric vehicles in a state.
3. Is each state prepared to provide the infrastructure for Electric Vehicles?
   • This question was not answered in the analysis, because the project was more focused on determining if there are some factors that could help predict whether there is going to be an increase in the percentage of electric vehicles in that state. A way in which this question can be answered is to do a deep analysis of the charging port plans of each state, how they intend on providing energy for the charging ports.
4. Which state will be able to provide mostly green energy for Electric Vehicle charging?
   • This is the secondary part of the project where the current energy composition of each state will be looked at and then the future composition will be predicted using SARIMA model. It is expected that there will be a pattern and seasonality in the composition of energy, this will allow applying multiple predictive models.
5. How will these states provide energy for charging Electric Vehicles?
   • This question was not answered in the analysis, since the project format was set to utilize all machine learning models, it became futile to focus on the tertiary goals of the project. This project was a good indicator of how not to use all possible models available for a single project and for a single goal.
6. Which state/s can expect to be the next hubs of Electric Vehicle population increase?
   • Besides from the already existing hotspots being California, Texas, Florida, Arizona and more, the upcoming hotspots for electric vehicles can be Delaware and Georgia.
7. Which state/s can expect will see the slowest EV adoption and why?
   • This will be found using SARIMA on the current data. Once SARIMA is performed the newly predicted features can be used to find what the state’s new percentage of electric vehicles will be. In 2020, the state with the lowest percentage of electric vehicles were Mississippi, North Dakota, South Dakota and Wyoming.
8. What factors were found to be irrelevant in determining the percentage of electric vehicle in each state?
   • It was initially thought that states with lower temperature will exhibit a slower increase and adoption. This hypothesis was proven false, because in the analysis it can be seen that states with a lower annual average temperatures are also amongst the early adopters of electric vehicles. Such as: Alaska, District of Columbia, New York and more.
9. How petroleum and diesel consumption will vary because of reduction in general gas powered vehicles?
   • This question was not answered since the project turned focus more on the features that can be used to predict the growth of electric vehicels rather than the composition of energy in each state to provide energy for electric vehicles.
10. What factors influence the purchase of Electric Vehicles over generic gas powered vehicles?

Economist Rudy Dornbusch in tandem with evadoption.com has predicted that EV mass adoption is coming. His work considers several socio economic and technological factors that affect the sales of EV vehicles. Although, only a few prove to have any influence on EV sales. There are certainly factors that are absent in his analysis that need to be looked at.

To answer the above questions, different aspects of a State in the United States have to be analyzed. Through this project, these questions will be answered and the procedure behind answering the question will be documented.

Source: https://hbr.org/2011/04/why-most-product-launches-fail