RCL 5S: The Future of Automobiles
I decided to produce an advocacy piece for one of the issues featured in my Civic Issues blog.
The particular subject that I chose is “why people should substitute to electric vehicles”.
Electric vehicle options are becoming more abundant, yet they are still a fairly new concept. Vehicles that burn gasoline and diesel produce harmful gases. These gases are known or suspected to cause cancer and other serious health conditions. By choosing to drive an electric vehicle, you are helping to lessen exhaust emissions that contribute to climate change and smog. This reduced air pollution improves public health and reduces ecological damage. And as electricity generation becomes cleaner, emissions will continue to go down over time.
On top of that, electric vehicles save you money in the long-run. No matter where you plug in across the country, electric are cheaper to fuel than their gasoline-powered counterparts. Like I said on my CI 3 post, with the current gas prices inflating the owners of electric vehicles are better off.
My main goal in this advocacy project is to build awareness for the people who can afford electric cars, and possibly advocate them to change their preference to electric vehicles.
I envision the percentage of people who can comfortably afford an electric vehicle as my target audience. Most car manufacturers are planning on having a all-electric production in a 10 year time. For example, Audi announced that all of their models from 2026 will be all-electric, and combustion engine production to end in 2033.
For example, electric vehicles are an essential part of the USC (Union of Concentrated Scientists) plan to cut America’s oil use in half in twenty years. Using oil causes an array of problems, and transportation remains reliant on oil as dominant energy source. Electric vehicles offer the potential to disrupt this status quo relationship between transportation and oil, and offer a cleaner, better way to fuel transportation to everyone.
With this in mind, it is believed that personal values, green self-identity and electric car adoption has four notable general values: self-transcendence, self-enhancement, openness-to-change, and conservation. This determines consumer intention to adopt electric vehicles both directly and indirectly via ecological care and moral obligation motivations. Furthermore, consumers who find self-transcendence and openness-to-change values important tend to express their green slef-identity directly into intentions and through moral obligation evaluations. Conversely, individuals who find self-enhancement values important to express their green slef-identity directly into intentions. And the people who finds conservation values important translate their green self-identity less into intentions to adopt electric vehicles, but tend to consider less the ecological and moral aspects of consumption choices.