Peter Wells

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• Professor at Cardiff University

Understanding consumer attitudes towards electric vehicle (EV) purchasing is essential for addressing the slow adoption rate. Traditional aggregated models of EV adoption employ a top-down approach, yet often fail to capture individual-level attitudes. In contrast, agent-based modelling (ABM) enables a bottom-up approach that reflects the heterogen...

Understanding consumer heterogeneity is crucial for analysing attitude formation and its role in innovation diffusion. Traditional top-down models struggle to reflect the nuanced characteristics and activities of the consumer population, while bottom-up approaches like agent-based modelling (ABM) offer the ability to simulate individual decision-ma...

The high investment costs of battery electric buses (BEBs), influenced directly by battery and infrastructure costs, pose a challenge that limits their large-scale adoption. Therefore, the success of this socio-technical transition requires economic feasibility analyses to identify the optimum adoption pathway. This study presents a system dynamics...

n the dynamic realm of global business and the pressing climate crisis, the need for sustainability transitions has become a pivotal catalyst for change, fundamentally reshaping the core tenets of companies’ business models. In this chapter, we delve into the notion of sustainability transitions and discuss the dynamic interplay between business mo...

Investigation of consumer attitude heterogeneity is crucial for understanding consumer behaviours and their influence on innovation diffusion. However, top-down aggregated models are constrained to reflect consumer population’s activity. Bottom-up methods, such as agent-based modelling, can capture individual’s features to simulate consumer decisio...

Investigating consumer attitudes towards electric vehicle (EV) purchasing is crucial for understanding their slow adoption rate. Traditional aggregated models evaluate EV market penetration with a top-down approach but fail to reflect individual attitudes. Agent-based modelling (ABM) captures consumer heterogeneous decision-making and simulates soc...

The aim of the paper is to provide a longitudinal account of the emergence and stabilization of the automobility system and to assess the contemporary state of the system in the early stages of an ongoing sustainability transition. The production, use, and disposal of cars, in a pervasive global automobility system, are examined to reveal and expla...

While transitions research has pursued a successful research agenda around how to improve established socio-technical systems in terms of sustainability, it has missed out, among other things, on innovations that make, or keep, societies less sustainable. In our paper, we explore two innovations in different stages of development: Sports utility ve...

The creation of circular business models to deliver the circular economy has been widely accepted as offering significant sustainability benefits. A related expectation is that in creating circular business models, focal companies will necessarily need to encompass multiple stakeholder partnerships to access the resources and skills which they lack...

The purpose of this chapter is to highlight the key differences in the production processes of battery electric vehicles (BEV) and internal combustion engine vehicles (ICEV). This exploration not only includes the fundamental physical architectural differences between the types of vehicles but also their entirely different supporting supply chains...

Business model innovation consists of new ways of defining, creating, and capturing value including non-monetary value, and is an indicator of crossing traditional sector boundaries, thereby providing the necessary agency to achieve significant new market opportunities around technological innovation. Individual businesses may lack the scope or dep...

Sustainability transitions are key to addressing grand challenges confronting humanity, yet there are many developments that undermine this endeavor. For example, new products and industries emerge that exacerbate existing challenges, instead of mitigating them. Context systems such as policy making, finance, education or independent journalism, wh...

The persistent problems confronting contemporary modern societies necessitate a sustainability transition through radical transformation and new business models towards a sustainable society. In this chapter and throughout the book we combine the two research streams of sustainability transitions and business models for sustainability to offer new...

'It is in exploring the complementarities of business model innovation and sustainability transitions where this book makes a major contribution. Bridging related but so far separate areas of research and generating new insights for strategy and policy making is key to destabilising unsustainable business practices, and to accelerate processes of t...

The 2020 Covid-19 pandemic provides an empirical testing ground for assessing the impact of critical events on societal transitions. Such events are typically seen as exogenous to the transition process, an assumption which is investigated in this paper. Using a qualitative system dynamics modelling approach we conceptualize transition pathways as...

Technological innovations in sociotechnical transitions are usually found in market or spatial niches. These novel niches may sometimes emerge and expand, and eventually may erode an established sociotechnical system regime. In this paper, we redefined niche emergence as potentially consequent from the convergence of different regimes. That is, it...

This policy brief argues that the COVID-19 pandemic exposes the fractures in the contemporary global socio-technical order and offers the prospects of several different alternative futures. The policy brief explores the pandemic through the lens of the multi-level perspective on socio-technical transitions. The pandemic is framed as a meta-transiti...

This paper presents an analysis, informed by socio-technical transitions theory and the socially derived concept of automobility, of the impact of the SARS-CoV-2 virus and resulting COVID-19 pandemic on automobility in Europe. The paper argues that the concept of a pervasive, sudden, and powerful crisis has not previously be explored in the socio-t...

Industrial advances and academic enquiry into the transition towards electrified mobility has been arguably preoccupied with the earlier phases of technological development, while less consideration has been given to the end-of-life phase. One example of this is the current technical and economic difficulties surrounding Battery Electric Vehicle (B...

With a focus on supply chains as ecosystems of service exchange, our paper aims to explore how value propositions are developed and evolve via combinations of service innovation. A single longitudinal case study is presented. The units of analysis are different projects along a logistics service provider (LSP)’s innovation journey. The study explor...

This paper examines the scope for network platform business models offering ‘automobility-as-a-service’ to disrupt the existing automotive market and industry. The paper uses three examples (Getaround, BlaBlaCar and Uber) to illustrate distinct versions of the network platform business model concept. Despite expectations that automobility-as-a-serv...

Research on sustainability transitions has expanded rapidly in the last ten years, diversified in terms of topics and geographical applications, and deepened with respect to theories and methods. This article provides an extensive review and an updated research agenda for the field, classified into nine main themes: understanding transitions; power...

This is a chapter concerned with the impossibility of zero-carbon logistics. The logistics industry faces a dilemma: not only to achieve continued cost reductions in the service provided, but also to manage the (rapid) transition to (near) zero-carbon logistics. The chapter reviews the issue of why logistics operations (transport and storage) need...

In this chapter, the evolving role of transport and logistics as the crucial intermediary processes between supply and demand is shown to be in tension. That is, the quest for least-cost manufacturing, in part enabled by the financial efficiency of mass transport via container ships, has resulted in the spatial dispersal of production and, inevitab...

This edited collection collates the most up-to-date and important research within the area of operations and logistics management. Boasting the combined expertise of one of the largest logistics and operations management academic teams in Europe, it provides both depth and diversity in a balanced portfolio. The first two sections are concerned with...

The Rogers model of innovation diffusion, first proposed in 1962, has long featured in accounts of the penetration of new product technologies into society. The contention in this paper is that this model is in fact only half complete, for it deals exclusively with the uptake of new technologies rather than their retention or abandonment. Taking th...

This paper has an empirical and theoretical focus: to empirically assess electric bicycle development in China, and to theoretically test and apply the “Multi-Level Perspective” on transitions and innovation. We examine the electric bicycle (e-bike) sector in China to understand the future prospects for urban mobility and the interaction of e-bikes...

With a focus on supply chains as ecosystems of service exchange, our paper aims to explore how value propositions are developed and evolve over time via combinations of different types of service innovation. We adopt a dynamic service-dominant logic and an ecosystems perspective, investigating supply chains as production/service systems involving:...

Previous work by Pettit et al (2017) drew on Socio-technical Transitions Theory (STT) to contextualise recent developments in the technological and operational eco-efficiency of ships which may ameliorate sustainability issues in shipping. Within STT the Multi-Level Perspective (MLP) is a framework used to explain the permeation of innovations into...

This paper is about emergent car cultures and how they may interact with novel technologies, innovative business models, and new ways of owning or using cars to create new mobilities.

In this paper, we ask whether electric bicycle (e-bike) use in urban China is a temporary phase or an embedded form of sustainable mobility. A survey was conducted in Nanjing in order to assess the characteristics and attitudes of electric bicycle users and other mode users (e.g. pedestrians; car drivers). Based on over 1000 responses a Logit Model...

This paper draws on socio-technical transitions theory to contextualise recent developments in the technological and operational eco-efficiency of ships, which may ameliorate but not resolve sustainability challenges in shipping. Taking an historical perspective, the paper argues that shipping is fundamentally a derived demand arising out of, but a...

This paper offers an innovative perspective on engaged scholarship as multiple, cumulative interactions between academia and external organizations in the business and policy realms. A definition of longitudinal immersion is positioned relative to the extant literature on academic engagement as a dialectic relationship between academic research and...

The application of socio-technical transitions analysis into realms such as sustainable mobility requires understanding the efficacy of policy measures ex ante. Electrification of the vehicle drivetrain is one possible solution to achieve carbon emission targets. National governments are developing policy measures to encourage electric vehicle (EV)...

There is an emergent understanding that humanity has precipitated an ‘Anthropocene’ such that we are now operating in a reduced space for humanity in which urgent action is required. This case study paper links degrowth, technological innovation, business model innovation and corporate governance. The arguments are illustrated with the case of an e...

This paper argues that only fundamental innovations in the governance structures, technologies, and business models of companies will enable the full development of sustainable manufacturing. This argument motivates the development of an analytical framework that integrates the concepts of governance, eco-design, and business model. This framework...

Topic B: Insights into the obstacles to a transition beyond consumerist societies) This paper seeks to explore theoretically and empirically how different interests are being pursued through the autonomous car concept, with scant hope for sustainable mobility in post-consumer society. Autonomous cars, variously defined (self-driving cars; driverles...

This paper seeks to balance the tendency to analyze EV business models in isolation by setting them in a wider context in which the automotive industry is seeking to reconcile continuity and change in an increasingly volatile and uncertain competitive environment. This paper argues that one reason for the relative lack of penetration of EVs and the...

This paper describes and seeks to understand the scale of the electric bicycle (electric two-wheeler) market in China, and to begin to explain its emergence with a view to outlining the prospects for learning from this case for applications in other countries around the world. Drawing on secondary data from Chinese government sources, electric bicy...

This chapter provides an overview of the scope and scale of external costs arising from automobility. It then focuses on two important aspects: road traffic deaths and injuries and environmental costs. In both cases, it is concluded that the rate of improvement in new vehicles and other interventions that might be expected to reduce these particula...

This chapter explains how the car has come to be defined in broad terms and how this makes the emergence of alternatives more difficult than would otherwise have been the case. There has always been a hidden world of non-car automobility and niche applications where the usual regime dynamics do not apply because of a range of contextual- and techno...

It is important that a more sustainable car type is still appealing; people should still want it as well as need it, even if such ‘needs’ are often in the mind of the beholder. Although, automotive steam power seems to have gone, it is also clear that for the next couple of decades or so we will still have internal combustion (IC) as the dominant t...

This chapter presents an account of the basis of the contemporary automotive industry business model. This is followed by an analysis of the pressures for change on this model and the scope for radical and incremental innovation. Much of this discussion is framed by the relative failure, to date, of policies to promote and support electric vehicle...

From the onset of the global financial crisis in around 2008, it became immediately apparent that any decline in economic growth, or indeed actual recession, has a profound impact on the demand for new cars. Of significance in this regard are the decline of automobility, broadly defined, in the mature industrial economies that first experienced the...

This introduction provides an overview of the concepts discussed in this book, which attempts to capture continuity and change in the global automotive industry. Despite an apparent ‘business-as-usual’ attitude permeating the automotive industry at the moment, in reality, it is subject to potentially radical change. In Europe, the apparent success...

The global automotive industry is one in which change does appear to be endemic, and much has been made of the processes of globalization whereby a single coherent industry may emerge. This chapter draws on three distinct literatures and perspectives with regard to the theoretical understanding of change and non-change in industrial structures. The...

Europe's industry is unique as it can offer prestige products with global appeal, such as those made by BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Jaguar, Bentley, Maserati and others. American luxury cars, as typified by General Motors? Cadillac brand, became mass produced. China has for some time been a good market for a range of Buick products developed in the United...

This article defines business models for sustainability as contested and contextual, and provides a novel framework in terms of the architecture of the business, its principles and components for the analysis of such models. With this framework, a preliminary comparison using the engaged scholarship methodology is made between microbreweries and la...

Electrification of the vehicle drivetrain offers a viable solution for the sustainability requirements of the transport sector and to achieve emission reduction targets. Supported by empirical evidence, that has shown that both technology push and technology pull policy instruments are important for diffusing technology into the marketplace, nation...

This review paper takes the perspective of cultures of automobility in an historical context to understand resistance to attempts to alter the personal automobility paradigm with more sustainable alternative mobility concepts. The paper seeks to urge caution upon those that identify ‘peak car’ or an imminent socio-technical transition to sustainabl...

This paper critiques the assumption that an urban setting is the most appropriate for electric vehicles. In so doing, it questions the implementation of transitions theory and socio-technical experiments in the quest to establish electric vehicles as an alternative to the existing automobility regime. For vehicle owners and infrastructure providers...

This article considers electric cars as socio-technical experiments in meeting mobility requirements. There have been numerous trials and government incentives to promote such vehicles, but with a notable lack of success. The article thus seeks to address an urgent need to understand such “transition failure,” which may ultimately impact upon how p...

This paper considers the transition from internal combustion engine cars toward electric cars, deploying case studies of the use of these vehicles within the UK. It uses socio-technical transitions theory to highlight how such new technologies break through from disparate niches into the mainstream. At the present time, perhaps academic and policy...

This commentary reviews the position articulated in an article published in 2004 that the business model prevalent in the automotive industry was inadequate to meeting the challenge of sustainability, and reviews the key developments since then. The most noticeable developments the commentary traces are the growth in academic interest in business m...

It is widely accepted that electrification of the transport sector is one of several technological trajectories that could redress some of the environmental issues associated with the growth in travel demand including climate change and oil demand at a global scale, and air quality and noise pollution at the urban scale. Electric vehicles have been...

This paper explores the relationship between diversity, locality, scale and sustainability in human systems. Using examples from brewing, steel production, and printing it suggests mass production economies of scale has peaked, creating new opportunities and challenges for sustainability science. It is concluded that there is a potential research a...

This article argues that nurturing the nascent electric vehicle industry and the attempts to achieve low carbon mobility in Europe, while laudable policy aims, lack a coherent treatment of social equity. The transition process is assumed to be largely technocratic and unproblematic. Consequently, the article identifies inter- and intra-regional dim...

This article reviews the scope of the discipline of industrial ecology and, in the context of an urgent requirement for substantial and rapid change in the face of global sustainability challenges, argues that the discipline could embrace a more proactive, interventionist stance in the form of renewable eco‐industrial development. Existing eco‐indu...

This paper explores the geographical and policy context for an emergent business model from Better Place to deliver battery electric car mobility in Denmark. It argues that the combination of radically different technologies and a highly complex multi-agency operating environment theoretically provide the conditions and requirements for such an eme...

To date, regional sustainability has been given attention because it is often the case that key actors and stakeholders can be coordinated at this level. However, scant attention has been given to the question of whether and to what extent regionally-defined solutions for sustainability could and should be different to each other. Taking the exampl...

This paper analyses the issue of whether governmental regulation results in higher producer costs that are then passed on as higher prices to the consumer, with a longitudinal study of the European automotive market. Using a large data set for the period 1995–2010 the hedonic price analysis study concludes that the claims that regulation would resu...

This paper explores the hitherto neglected combined contribution of automobility cultures and corruption to prevailing death and injury rates from road traffic, with an emphasis on developing countries. Automobility cultures are argued to be crucial to real-world death and injury rates. The paper then argues that indices of public corruption may be...

This paper examines the historic development of the Brazilian sugarcane ethanol sector and the largely successful attempt to create a sustainable, renewable fuel for the transport sector. The policy that resulted from this process is an example of meeting the need for sustainable transport through the consideration of location-specific characterist...

Eco-industrialism embraces the concept of spatially-concentrated and inter-connected industrial activities that collectively are eco-efficient in the use of resources, though not necessarily premised on renewable resources. One area of activity that has potential for renewable eco-industrialism is that of bio-plastics; specifically in this case the...

As the electric vehicle industry prepares to make the transition from niche to volume applications, so it is apparent that the traditional automotive industry value chain is insufficient to the task. The successful production, sale and use of electric vehicles on a large scale demands that the industry look beyond traditional boundaries to create n...

This paper provides a case study of the Tata Nano, a low-price car designed primarily in and for the Indian market, and its implications for the developed industrial markets. While the Nano is a classic ‘disruptive’ innovation in an Indian context, this paper argues that the car and its emulators have the potential to undermine the viability of the...

This unique book seeks to combine economic analysis with the environmental research to arrive at a comprehensive understanding of the forces that shape change in the automotive industry. It eschews the usual focus on technologies, and gives more attention to the impact of change on the business models and strategies adopted by the vehicle manufactu...

This paper argues that the automotive industry has reached the end of a prolonged period of technological monoculture that allowed and necessitated the kind of monolithic industrial structure, business models and operational practices currently in evidence. Using multiple micro-case-studies and examples from around the world, this paper will furthe...

The central theme of this chapter is a preference ranking analysis of a group of motor vehicles based on their chemical emissions. Beyond the initial ranking of the motor vehicles, operationalised using the multi-criteria decision making technique PROMETHEE, further analysis is given on how the manufacturers of a motor vehicle could improve its pre...

'A splendid analysis of how an automotive industry based on mass production has become an alien in our time - where diversity and personalised products and services have become the norm. Peter Wells presents an intriguing analysis of how the automotive industry can find ways forward and re-invent itself. A must read for all interested in sustainabl...

This paper demonstrates the relative non-engagement of universities in regional sustainability initiatives through a case study of Cardiff University in Wales. It is argued that the turbulent and often complicated political and administrative context along with divergent goals and performance targets means that synergies are less readily achieved....

This paper explores the interface between celebrity, academia, the media and environmentalism. It examines the scope and extent of green celebrity and of a specific instance in which a celebrity was involved in the dissemination of a report that referred to the problems of inappropriate vehicles in urban areas. The paper is not intended to be defin...

The motor vehicle has provided mobility and individual freedom for millions of people. However, vehicles embody the dilemma of contemporary industrialisation in that the environmental costs of automobility are equally large. This non-country specific study undertakes a PROMETHEE-based preference ranking of a small set of motor vehicles based on con...

This article introduces the fundamental rational that supports the ‘technological regime’ of the modern automobile, as well as its potential for inertia, transformation and decline. It presents the main concepts used in automobile design, material selection, and the economic fundamentals that orient today's car assembly and commercialisation. The p...

This paper presents an analysis of the implications of motorisation in emerging economies for deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents. It is shown that emerging economies have high rates of death and injury alongside low vehicle ownership rates. If vehicle ownership rates increase, so too could be the rate of deaths and injuries. Taking a b...

This paper summarises the contributions made to the special issue on The automobile Industry & Sustainability. Taking a life-cycle perspective, the contributions are allocated into the automotive life-cycle phases of design, manufacture (and supply chain management), use, and disposal or ‘end of life vehicle’ management. The contributions are also...

This article provides a novel account of the development of the mass production car industry. The usual primacy given to Henry Ford, the moving assembly line and the organisation of labour is counter-balanced by a focus on production technology. Using historical sources, emphasis is placed on the all-steel body technology pioneered by Edward Budd,...