Why Consumers Resist Electric Cars: An Analysis of Purchase Barriers

Most research on fully electric cars (ECs) still focuses on adoption drivers, treating obstacles either residually or as the simple inverse of drivers. This leaves practitioners with unprioritised lists of barriers and little guidance on which deterrents to tackle first, especially in late-adopting contexts. Southern Italy—characterised by high car ownership, low EC uptake, and infrastructural constraints—offers a critical setting to examine latent resistance. We reframe the Kano model as a diagnostic for innovation resistance and adopt a three-phase qualitative design: expert interviews to scope ownership frictions; a focus group to explore how consumers articulate them; and a Kano questionnaire to classify EC attributes and identify which ones trigger dissatisfaction when unmet and which yield proportional gains when improved. The analysis classifies ten attributes into two must-be, six one-dimensional, and two indifferent categories. Battery durability/warranty clarity and recharging infrastructure emerge as high-priority levers, while resale value and “cool factor” are currently indifferent. By mapping Kano categories onto innovation-resistance mechanisms, the study proposes a transferable framework for diagnosing resistance in late-adopting markets and clarifies when functional versus symbolic attributes dominate. Implications are derived for firms (warranty transparency, cost-containment, infrastructure partnerships) and policy makers (infrastructure reliability, disclosure standards, risk-sharing instruments).