Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 178 (2023) 113242

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/rser

Public attitudes and sentiments towards new energy vehicles in China: A

text mining approach
Zezhou Wu a, b, c, Qiufeng He a, b, c, *, Jiarun Li c, Guoqiang Bi d, Maxwell Fordjour Antwi-Afari e
a
Key Laboratory for Resilient Infrastructures of Coastal Cities (Shenzhen University), Ministry of Education, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
b
Sino-Australia Joint Research Centre in BIM and Smart Construction, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
c
College of Civil and Transportation Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
d
Jinan Haiying Real Estate Development Company, Jinan, 250000, China
e
Department of Civil Engineering, College of Engineering and Physical Sciences, Aston University, Birmingham, B4 7ET, United Kingdom

A R T I C L E I N F O A B S T R A C T

Keywords: Public attitudes and sentiments are considered important factors driving the development of new energy vehicles
New energy vehicles (NEVs) in China, yet few studies have effectively articulated the public attitudes and sentiments on a national
Public attitude scale. Social media platforms provide open and large-scale data on how the public views NEVs. Accordingly,
Sentiment analysis
based on data collected from Sina Weibo, the largest open social media platform in China, this study adopts web
Text mining
crawler and text mining to explore public attitudes and sentiments toward NEVs. The results show that the
China
majority of NEVs followers belong to the media and broadcasting unit, which may lead to exaggerated adver­
tising of NEVs performance. Public pay more attention to NEVs in environmental pollution and developed
economies regions than others. In addition, it is found that the public is generally concerned about driving range,
policies, battery charging and safety performance, and NEVs-related attributes. Some interesting findings are that
preferential policies such as unrestricted driving are more popular with the public than tax incentives, and the
public attaches a high degree of importance to the brand in the attributes of NEVs. Moreover, the Chinese public
has relatively positive sentiments on NEVs, mainly due to the impact of China’s carbon reduction targets.
Negative sentiments are mainly due to safety and battery technology issues. Finally, some policy implications
derived from the discussion are given.

1. Introduction
The continuous rapid development of the automotive industry has
exacerbated China’s dependence on foreign oil and air pollution levels
[1]. Promoting the adoption of new energy vehicles (NEVs) is consid­
ered an important measure to alleviate these problems [2–4]. NEVs refer
to four-wheel vehicles, electric vehicles, pure electric vehicles and
plug-in hybrid electric vehicles using non-traditional fuels such as bio­
ethanol, liquid natural gas and biogas, as well as various hybrid types of
these vehicles [5], which are designated as one of China’s seven strategic
emerging industries [6]. Recently, China’s market share of NEVs has
grown significantly, from 74,800 units in 2014 to 1.367 million units in
2020 [7]. Nevertheless, the market share of NEVs is still tiny, only about
5.40% in 2020, far below the target set by the Chinese government for
NEVs to take up about 25% of the market share in 2025 [8].
Such market penetration rate of NEVs is unsatisfactory as it falls
short of the efforts made by the Chinese government in the past years to
accelerate NEVs adoption [9]. Facts have proved that the dilemma of
“hot policy” and “cold market” faced by China’s NEVs is largely related
to the Chinese public. The public is considered to be the main partici­
pants in the dance game of driving the NEVs industry in China [10], and
their attitudes could directly affect the adoption of NEVs [11–13].
Especially, studies based on planned behavior theory and rational choice
theory have found that consumer attitudes, emotions and subjective
social norms are the basis of behavioral intention [14,15]. Under­
standing specific sentiments and attitudes associated with the adoption
of NEVs is critical for design communication, education, and policy to
overcome some of the barriers to consumer adoption of NEVs [16].

Abbreviations: NEVs, new energy vehicles; LDA, latent Dirichlet allocation.

* Corresponding author. Key Laboratory for Resilient Infrastructures of Coastal Cities (Shenzhen University), Ministry of Education, Shenzhen University,
Shenzhen, China.
E-mail address: 1900474011@email.szu.edu.cn (Q. He).

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.rser.2023.113242
Received 5 July 2022; Received in revised form 27 December 2022; Accepted 6 March 2023
Available online 16 March 2023
1364-0321/© 2023 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Z. Wu et al.
However, past studies on the public attitudes towards NEVs only
focused on a single or a few cities [17,18]. Chinese public attitudes to­
ward NEVs have yet to be effectively articulated nationwide. Addition­
ally, a majority of existing studies collected data through questionnaire
survey or interviews [19,20], which is relatively subjective and has
certain inherent defects [21]. For example, respondents can only choose
from the options given by the experimental designer, or the results may
be biased due to the small sample size of the respondents [22]. Against
this backdrop, Li et al. [23] called for a more objective and large-scale
investigation of future research on NEVs. With the widespread use of
social media and the rapid development of computer technology, as well
as the maturity of large-scale user-generated data and natural language
processing technologies, this kind of objective, large-scale survey is
possible. Social media carries people’s opinions from all over the
country, and these rich social media data provide real-time and effective
analysis content for analysts [24]. In addition, analysts can use social
media to access users’ metadata, such as location and time, to further
analyze views from a demographic perspective [25]. Text mining se­
mantic technology can extract useful insights from a large amount of
disordered data without any prior knowledge input [26,27], overcoming
the limitations of traditional methods in terms of time, space, and
sample size [28]. Therefore, using text mining technology to extract
public attitudes to NEVs from social media data is worth discussing.
Previous studies on the adoption of NEVs have neglected to pay
attention to public sentiment [29]. Higueras-Castillo et al. [30] showed
that public sentiment is crucial in purchasing NEVs. Positive public
sentiments could lead to positive consumer attitudes, while negative
public sentiments could trigger consumer resistance. In particular,
negative public sentiments could also cause consumers to overreact to
bad news and spread it in a herding fashion [31]. In the era of the rise of
the Internet, consumers’ judgment of product value relies heavily on
social media platforms, and public opinion seriously affects consumers’
decision-making behavior [32]. To fill out this research gap, this study
aims to collect data from Sina Weibo which is the public social media
platform with the largest number of internet users in China [33], and use
text mining to objectively investigate the public attitudes and sentiments
towards new energy vehicles in China. The rest of this paper is organized
as follows. Section 2 reviews relevant studies. Section 3 describes the
data collection procedure and research methodology used in this study.
The results obtained are further analyzed and discussed in Section 4.
Conclusions and policy implications are put forward in Section 5.
2. Literature review
2.1. Status quo of NEVs implementation in China
The implementation of NEVs is an important national strategy for
China to alleviate environmental pollution and cope with the fossil en­
ergy crisis [34]. China’s earliest NEV industry started in the early 21st
century and was identified as one of the seven strategic emerging in­
dustries in 2010 [35]. By the end of 2016, China has become the world’s
largest electric vehicle market in production and sales [36]. The rapid
development of NEVs in China is largely attributed to the support of the
government’s diversification policies, such as cancellation of driving
restrictions, purchasing subsidy, bypass of the lottery system, tax
reduction and exemption, as well as innovative policies for supporting
NEVs rental and ride-sharing business [37–39]. Although China has
made great progress in the implementation of NEVs through government
efforts, some challenges remain. Compared to conventional automo­
biles, the market share of NEVs is still tiny. Especially, the vast majority
of these sold NEVs are used for public transport services such as urban
buses, and only a few for private use [34]. Several studies have explored
the factors hindering the market diffusion of NEVs and found that public
attitude is one of the main factors [40,41].
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Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 178 (2023) 113242
2.2. Attitudes and sentiments of the Chinese public toward NEVs
Positive impression of NEVs leads to more positive sentiments to­
wards NEVs. This positive attitude in turn could positively affect the
willingness to use NEVs [10,14,41]. Understanding the public attitudes
and sentiments helps facilitate communication between policymakers,
technologists, and the public [42].
Previous studies on consumer’s use of NEVs mainly focused on the
factors that determine consumers’ purchase intention for NEVs, and
found that these factors mainly include three categories, namely, de­
mographic, situational, and psychological [23]. Specifically, these fac­
tors cover the purchase price, charging time, size, policy, charging
availability, appearance, etc. [43]. Other studies have mentioned the
public impressions of NEVs including high price [34], low safety per­
formance [44], limited cruise range [45], and environmental friendli­
ness [46].
It can be observed that public sentiment is often ignored in the
research on consumers’ attitudes and behaviors towards adopting NEVs.
A recent study shows that public sentiment in India has a significant
impact on the willingness to adopt NEVs [29], while there has been a
lack of research on the Chinese public in this regard. In addition, other
studies on the public attitudes towards NEVs only focused on a single or
a few cities, and previous studies almost all adopt the method of ques­
tionnaire survey [47,48]. These studies cannot fully reflect the views of
the public because the sample size is relatively small and respondents
can only choose answers from the given options. Furthermore, China’s
public external evaluations of NEVs have yet to be effectively articulated
on a national scale. According to the so-called Chinese herd mentality
[49], positive or negative external evaluation and trend following could
also significantly affect the purchase behavior of NEVs purchasing
behavior [17,50]. Especially for those potential consumers who have not
personally experienced NEVs, they always rely on public word of mouth
or external evaluation to assist decision-making [32].
Thus, it is necessary to conduct an objective study based on a larger
sample size to understand the attitudes and mainstream sentiment of the
Chinese public towards NEVs and provide more useful inspirations for
future policy improvement and manufacturer decision-making.
2.3. Mining public sentiments and attitudes in social media
Social media includes online platforms such as Facebook, YouTube,
WhatsApp, Twitter, and Sina Weibo [51], where nearly 3.6 billion
people around the world express their likes and dislikes about something
on a daily basis [52]. Rich social media data has recently become a
valuable resource for companies to excavate public sentiments, attitudes
[53], and behavior [54], with more than 75% companies collecting and
using these data resources to monitor the health of their brands [55].
These social media data not only have a large amount of data, but also
avoid the interference of subjectivity and the limitation of time and
space [22]. In the case of NEVs, their potential customers are usually
millennials, who are willing to express their opinions on social media
and often rely heavily on these opinions to judge the value of their
products [32]. The integration of these opinions further forms positive
or negative sentiments towards NEVs. As mentioned in the introduction,
positive sentiments or negative sentiments could spread online in a herd
effect, and then directly affect the choice of the public to a greater
extent. Therefore, using social media data to mine public attitudes and
sentiments towards NEVs can effectively bridge the gap between man­
ufacturers and customers [56]. Sina Weibo is the largest open social
media platform in China [57], with the number of monthly active users
increasing to 573 million as of September 30, 2021 [22], providing a
suitable platform for collecting online comment data from Chinese
users.
Text mining is a popular and effective method for extracting useful
insights from large amounts of disorderly data without any prior
knowledge. The combination of this method and web crawler can
Z. Wu et al.
expand the sample size as well as improve the objectivity of data
collection and analysis [43,58]. The effectiveness of this method for
mining public attitudes and sentiments based on Web-generated opin­
ions has been demonstrated in multiple research fields, such as sus­
tainable buildings [33,59], municipal solid waste [60], epidemiology
[61], e-waste [56], finance [62] and among others.
To sum up, exploring public attitudes and sentiments are of great
significance in boosting the growth of the NEVs industry, especially in
the context of a new and ambitious NEVs diffusion plan formulated by
the Chinese government in 2021. Previous relevant studies were con­
ducted through questionnaires or interviews, for which the data used for
analysis were mainly subjective. Using text mining and web crawler to
analyze Web-generated opinions in social media can expand the sample
size and can provide more objective insights.
3. Data and methodology
3.1. Data collection
Web crawler has been subscribed to be ideally suitable for collecting
large-scale data [63]. Psychological analysis-related studies have widely
adopted this method and considered it suitable to investigate the pub­
lic’s actual attitudes [64,65]. The data structure derived from the web
crawler is twofold, including the individual user-generated data and the
metadata [63], which can be used to understand the rich psychological
Fig. 1. The workflow of the web crawler.
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activities of users. Generally, a crawler program can obtain the content
of a web page according to the web link address (URL), analyze the
structure of web pages to extract useful information, and can also
analyze other links of web pages with recursive retrieval [66]. The
detailed web crawler program adopted in this study is shown in Fig. 1.
In this study, Python 3.7 programming tool was used to develop a
crawler program to download the needed information on Sina Weibo.
The detailed data collection process is as follows.
(1) Simulated login. This study adopts a post code module to submit
personal accounts and passwords to achieve simulated login on
Sina Weibo web page (https://m.weibo.cn/).
(2) Keywords retrieval. Taking “new energy vehicles” as the keyword
with timestamps from 00:00 on January 1, 2022, to 24:00 April
30, 2022 to get the initial URL of Weibo posts.
(3) Data collection. Load into each post page to parse the page
structure and return easy-to-process JavaScript-based light­
weight data exchange format, and then extract useful data,
including the individual user-generated data (i.e., username,
authentication conditions, introduction), Weibo posts-related
data (i.e., post content, post time, retweeting, thump-up,
comment counts), and comments-related data (i.e., comment
publisher, comment content, comment time).
(4) Data pre-processing. Export and save 527,699 acquired raw
Weibo posts and 2781,192 comments under these posts to Excel
Z. Wu et al.
file. Considering that the data may include interference infor­
mation, some Weibo posts that label themselves related to NEVs,
while the actual content is irrelevant to NEVs are deleted
manually. Specifically, some advertising posts and duplicate
posts are also removed manually. A total of 32,381 Weibo posts
and 163,767 comments are finally obtained.
3.2. Text mining
Text mining can extract heuristic information from extensive semi-
structured or unstructured data. Some of its common applications
include text topic mining, text sentiment analysis, text keyword
extraction, text clustering, text co-citation analysis and so on. This study
used the first two application types to explore the public’s attitudes and
sentiments towards NEVs.
Before digging heuristic information, the data needs to be cleaned
and separated into words for further topic mining and sentiment anal­
ysis. The specific steps are as follows.
(1) Data cleaning. The manually preprocessed data is further cleaned
up. The regular expression codes are written in Python to remove
useless information from the data, such as punctuation marks,
spaces, and other non-text characters.
(2) Word segmentation. Before the word segmentation, a new-word
dictionary is built to avoid mistakenly separating some terms.
The Jieba package, a Chinese word segmentation tool, is then
called in Python to segment words based on the new-word dic­
tionary and the stop-word dictionary. Finally, a corpus that can
be further used for text mining is constructed.
(3) LDA topic modeling. Topic mining is performed through latent
Dirichlet allocation (LDA) in this study. LDA is a computational
content-analysis technique that can be used to excavate the
“hidden” topics from the given documents [67]. The basic idea is
that the documents are represented as random mixtures over
Fig. 2. Research outline.
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Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 178 (2023) 113242
latent topics, where a topic is characterized by a distribution over
words [26]. The specific application of LDA is as follows. Firstly,
the words in corpus are randomly assigned to one of N topics. The
number of topic N is a user-defined parameter [68], which can be
obtained by calculating the perplexity of LDA [69]. Then, ac­
cording to the Gibbs sampling formula, each word is again
assigned to a new topic. This process is repeated until the Gibbs
sampling converges. The topic-word co-occurrence frequency
matrix in the corpus is calculated as the final LDA model. Finally,
the LDAvis package called in Python helps visualize the results of
the LDA topic modeling. From the visualization results, the topic
number of public attention (i.e., the number of topic N) can be
visually observes, and the meaning of each topic can be obtained
by manually summarizing the most salient terms on the topic [70,
71].
(4) Sentiment analysis. Sentiment analysis in this study aims to
investigate the public’s sentiment orientations towards NEVs,
and is performed in the NLPIR-Parser platform. The platform
constructs the sentiment dictionary based on the ontology data­
base of Chinese affective vocabulary constructed by Dalian Uni­
versity of Technology and the Ekman’s seven basic emotion
models [59]. It can subdivide sentiments into interest, happiness,
anger, surprise, sadness, fear, and disgust [60]. The first two
express positive sentiments and the rest express negative senti­
ments. Moreover, the word frequency related to negative or
positive sentiments provided by the NLPIR-Parser platform could
clearly explain the focus of public sentiments.
In short, as shown in Fig. 2, the overall research idea of this paper is
based on the twofold data obtained by web crawler, and methods of
statistical analysis and text mining are adopted to explore the public’s
attitudes and sentiments towards NEVs.
Z. Wu et al.
4. Results and discussion
4.1. Public attention status
4.1.1. Occupational status of the public
The crawled Weibo posts were posted by 15,081 users, of which
11,541 have been verified by Weibo. According to the information of
institution verified users or the career information of individual verified
users, the users can be grouped into the following professional cate­
gories: government agency, research institute, ecological environment
unit, new energy technology unit, internet technology unit, vehicle
producer/dealer, equipment supplier, securities and fund unit, traffic
control unit, fire rescue unit, motor repair unit, as well as media and
broadcasting unit. The details are shown in Fig. 3. It revealed that the
top three individual user types are the media and broadcasting unit,
securities and fund unit, and Internet technology unit. Their top three
followers also came from these three fields. Regarding institution users,
the top three professional types are the media and broadcasting unit,
internet technology unit, and fire rescue unit. These indicate that in the
field of NEVs, most Weibo post publishers and followers belong to the
media and broadcasting unit, which reflects that NEVs have been widely
publicized in China. However, the appropriateness of such widespread
publicity deserves closer scrutiny. The Xinhua News Agency, China’s
most influential news website, reported in January 2021 that there was
“excessive publicity” in the domestic NEV industry [72]. Xiong and
Wang [73] suggested that consumers should be correctly guided to un­
derstand the core information related to NEVs for changing the
one-sidedness and incompleteness of the current propaganda process.
4.1.2. Regional trends of public attention
Based on the main elements of urban economic and social develop­
ment (i.e., development of the eastern region first, raise of the central
Fig. 3. The number of Weibo users and their followers in various professional categories.
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Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 178 (2023) 113242
region, development of the western region, and revitalization of the
northeast) [74], China can be divided into four major economic regions:
Eastern China, Northeastern China, Central China, and Western China,
excluding Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau. According to the statistical
results of the registration regions of 14,670 mainland users, as illus­
trated in Fig. 4, the order of regions with the largest average number of
registered users in each province is as follows: East > Central > West >
Northeast. Among them, the economically developed provinces of Bei­
jing, Guangdong, Shanghai, and Zhejiang in the eastern region have
many users. This finding is consistent with previous studies [75–77],
which showed that the more economically developed regions paid more
attention to the sustainability of the transportation industry. Because the
economically developed provinces always have continuous investment
in environmental governance and R & D activities [78], thus promoting
the diffusion of NEVs in society [79]. In addition, air quality in these
provinces is generally at risk of serious pollution due to the influence of
urbanization, industrial production, and automobile exhaust emissions
[80,81]. As one of the important ways to improve air quality and opti­
mize energy structure, NEVs have attracted more attention from local
governments and citizens in economically developed provinces. As
mentioned in the New Energy Vehicle Industry Development Plan
(2021–2035) [8], the proportion of public NEVs in key areas of national
air pollution prevention and control (such as Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai,
etc.) should not be less than 80%.
4.2. Public attention topics
By performing LDA topic modeling on the collected Weibo posts and
visualizing the results, the study obtained the top four topics of public
concern, as shown in Figs. 5–8. The left panel of the visualization is some
circles, whose size and number indicate the importance, sequence
number of different topics, and whose positions indicate the proximity
Z. Wu et al. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 178 (2023) 113242

Fig. 4. Distribution of Weibo users in four economic development regions. (Note: ANP is the average number of registered people in each province.)

Fig. 5. LDA topic model of Weibo posts -Topic 1.

of the topics. The right panel presented a horizontal histogram each topic, the specific focus that people pay the most attention to could
composed of 30 bars in which each bar represented an individual term be derived. Observingly, LDA does not assign each word exclusively to a
that is most useful for explaining the topic. By analyzing the terms under single topic, so a word may appear in more than one topic group to be

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Fig. 6. LDA topic model of Weibo posts -Topic 2.

Fig. 7. LDA topic model of Weibo posts -Topic 3.

used to explain different topic meanings [82]. the public pays high attention to NEVs batteries, driving range, and
The most popular topic is Topic 1, regarding the driving range of charging stations. Recently, although the driving range of NEVs can
NEVs. As seen from the most relevant terms on the right side of Fig. 5, meet the demand of short trips, people still have a strong concern.

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Z. Wu et al.
Fig. 8. LDA topic model of Weibo posts -Topic 4.
Through browsing the original text data, it is found that most users
mentioned: “the driving range of NEVs is erratic, its actual driving range
is not if the official claims. The driving range is always affected by
weather or battery life”. Other users even reflected in a disgusted tone
that “if I have to wait for an hour to recharge it, there’s no way I’m going
to buy it”, “Charging is a hassle, if you are in highway service areas or
second and third-tier cities, it may take a long time to approach the
charging stations”. These findings imply that concerns about driving
range stem from unstable battery life, long charging time, and inade­
quate charging infrastructure.
Topic 2 is about NEVs-related policy. As can be seen from the most
relevant terms in Fig. 6, policies that attract wide attention include
purchase subsidy, exemption from vehicle purchase tax, no driving re­
striction, and preferential purchase restriction. Among them, privilege
policies such as no driving restriction attract more public attention than
preferential tax policy, which can be proved by some high-frequency
terms (i.e., “green license plate”, “convenience”) and the fact that
most users mentioned that “I bought it because there is no driving re­
striction”. Other policies that have caught the public’s attention include
infrastructure and battery technology support policies. Users have
widely diffused such policies, desiring that these policies could improve
technical problems such as driving range and charging time. Moreover,
the terms “carbon neutralization” and “emission reduction” indicate
that people also attach great importance to the environmental policies,
and believe that it could lead to an increase in the market share of NEVs
in the future. As mentioned in the Weibo posts, “NEV is an important
guarantee to achieve carbon neutralization and a mainstream trend in
the future development of the automobile industry”.
As shown in Fig. 7, Topic 3 reflects the public’s attention to battery
technology. Battery technology has an essential impact on battery per­
formance (i.e., longevity, capacity), battery price, charging time, and
safety [83,84]. As users complained, “as the technology of NEVs is not
mature enough, the battery life is not long enough, and battery
replacement is always very expensive”. In addition, the term “safety”
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Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 178 (2023) 113242
and related terms “spontaneous combustion” and “explosion” have also
been raised many times under this topic. Due to the heating problem of
battery pack, NEVs are prone to spontaneous combustion [43]. The
Chinese public particularly focuses on the safety performance of NEVs,
which has had a critical impact on consumers’ purchase decisions. As
some users mentioned, “what we are most worried about is spontaneous
combustion, which may lead to safety accidents”.
Topic 4 is about NEVs-related attributes. As illustrated in Fig. 8, the
unique features of the vehicle itself that the public pays attention to
include “endurance”, “price”, “appearance”, “brand”, “vehicle type”,
“configuration”, “performance”, “interiors”, “size” and “after-sale ser­
vice”, among which the first three are the most important factors for
publics to consider. Indeed, this is in line with the expectation that
people would like good-looking NEVs with better performance at a
lower price [21,43]. Additionally, Chinese consumers also attach great
importance to the brand. Previous studies indicated that brand directly
affects customers’ perceptions of product and service quality [85–87].
Especially as people become increasingly sensitive to the potential safety
hazards of NEVs, they become more trusting of good brands, because
these brands are always formed by great reputation and trustworthy
quality [88].
4.3. Public sentiments analysis and focus
All comments from the Weibo posts were used to analyze sentiment
orientation, and the high-frequency keywords in the comments were
used to explain the specific reasons for the public’s different sentiments
towards NEVs. As illumined in Fig. 9, comments containing positive
sentiments account for the vast majority, accounting for 71.23%, most of
which are expressed as interest (53.50%). This finding contrasts with the
study of Jena [29], who found that negative sentiments are more
prevalent in India, mainly due to higher purchase costs and immature
battery maintenance technology. The research result of this study is
consistent with most other studies, that is, although people have
Z. Wu et al.
Fig. 9. The proportion of positive sentiments and related keywords.
expressed some concerns about NEVs, they still maintain a highly pos­
itive and interested attitudes towards NEVs [17,20,89–92].
Commenters who hold positive attitudes on NEVs believe that NEVs
have benefits in terms of “fuel economy” and “non-gas-guzzler”, and that
NEVs have “pro-environment” benefits. This finding is consistent with
previous findings that environmental concerns can significantly increase
the public’s positive perception of NEVs [93], especially among con­
sumers with higher environmental awareness [12]. For example, one
commenter said “Compared with traditional cars, NEVs are more
fuel-efficient and environmentally friendly”. Another thing worth
paying attention to is that some publics show the cognition that NEVs
can bring less “carbon emissions”. By reviewing the comment text
associated with this keyword, it can find that many publics mentioned
China’s carbon peak and carbon neutrality targets. The public generally
believes that under the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality targets
[94,95], NEVs could become “the way of the future” and “future of
travel”. For example, one of the commenters mentioned that “the
country is implementing the long-term goal of carbon neutrality and
carbon emission reduction. The use of NEVs is much cleaner than those
burning oil, and it can also get rid of the country’s dependence on oil,
which could be the development prospect of the auto industry in the
future”. It follows that China’s carbon reduction policies and public
awareness of environmental protection have to some extent stimulated
positive public sentiments.
Fig. 10. The proportion of negative sentiments and related keywords.
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Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 178 (2023) 113242
Comments containing negative emotions account for 28.77%, among
which disgust was dominant (20.77%), as shown in Fig. 10. The negative
attitudes towards NEVs mainly comes from concerns about “safety”,
“battery life”, “driving range”, “recharging time”, etc. The safety of
NEVs is often related to explosion accidents caused by “spontaneous
combustion” or “brake failure”, which is the most concerning issue for
the public. This finding is consistent with previous literature in China
[12]. Additionally, people are not convinced of the endurance of NEVs.
Because the public found that the endurance of NEVs in bad weather or
after repeated charging is not as long as advertised, further causing
public anxiety about the mileage [12]. Therefore, to eliminate con­
sumers’ resistance to NEVs, attention should be paid to improving the
safety performance of vehicles, optimizing battery technology, and
developing fast charging technology. In addition, it is worth noting that
the most significant factor leading to negative public sentiments towards
NEVs in India is price, while this factor does not cause great negative
sentiments in China. A search for price-related comments showed that
subsidies played a key role in dispelling negative public sentiments
about prices, such as one user’s comment that “the price is very
attractive with subsidies”.
5. Conclusions and policy implications
The development of NEVs is a crucial issue to promote the
Z. Wu et al.
transformation of the national energy structure and reduce environ­
mental pollution. This study used data from social media platforms to
excavate the status quo, topics, sentiment orientation and focus of public
concern for NEVs through occupational analysis, regional analysis, text
mining, topic modeling and sentiment analysis. The discussion of
occupational categories indicates that the media and broadcasting units
release the most information about NEVs, which may cause excessive
hype on the Internet about the endurance capacity and safety perfor­
mance of new energy vehicles [72]. From the perspective of the regional
characteristics of public concern, the public in economically developed
areas are more concerned about NEVs, which is mainly attributed to
more funding for R & D activities, more serious traffic problems and
stricter environmental policies in these regions [77,78]. In terms of the
topic of public concern, the Chinese public is most concerned about the
driving range of NEVs. A reasonable driving range could satisfy their
basic needs for daily travel and long-distance travel [96]. The second
topic of concern is NEV policy. Notably, privilege policies such as no
driving restriction attract more public attention than preferential tax
policy. Battery technology is also the most discussed topic among the
public, as it determines several prominent issues of NEVs, including
charging time, driving range, and safety performance. NEVs-related
attributes are also a hot topic. To obtain cost-effective NEVs, people
pay wide attention to their four characteristics of endurance, price,
appearance, and after-sale service. Additionally, the brand is increas­
ingly in the public spotlight, especially some familiar brands, such as
Tesla and NextEV. The public prefers brands with a good reputation and
high-cost performance. Meanwhile, the public tends to take its views on
leading enterprise brands as an evaluation of the trend of the whole NEV
industry. As for public sentiments, an interesting finding is that although
the public is worried about NEVs, they are generally positive. This
finding is contrary to the research of Jena [29]. The Chinese public’s
positive sentiment toward NEVs is largely benefited from the carbon
peak and carbon neutrality targets. The public is generally aware that
NEVs could be the future trend of China’s auto industry because NEVs
can change the energy structure and reduce carbon emissions. The
public’s negative sentiments toward NEVs stems mainly from safety
concerns and dissatisfaction with battery technology.
Based on the research findings, the following policy recommenda­
tions are proposed.
(1) Promote the rule of law construction of the Internet, strictly
check the authenticity of media advertising and the crackdown
on the exaggeration of NEVs performance by online publicity, to
avoid the occurrence of consumers’ distrust of NEVs, thus
inhibiting the market penetration of NEVs. Meanwhile, it is sug­
gested to focus on communicating the concept of carbon peak and
carbon neutrality through official media or public figures on so­
cial media, so as to make the public widely aware of the impor­
tance of carbon reduction and have a profound influence on the
public’s pro-environment behavior.
(2) Strengthen privilege policies (i.e., car purchase and driving re­
strictions) and environmental protection policies. And balance
subsidies and transportation environmental protection policies in
economically underdeveloped areas.
(3) Enhance support for core technologies of NEVs, especially battery
technologies, to eliminate public concerns about a series of
problems brought about by these technologies, such as unstable
driving range in harsh environments, battery-related safety ac­
cidents, short battery life, and brake failure [97].
(4) Chinese consumers pay more and more attention to the reputa­
tion of NEV brands and even unilaterally evaluate the whole NEV
industry with the quality of some leading enterprise brands. In
the future, the government should pay attention to how to create
a healthy market environment, build reputable NEV brands, as
well as strengthen the sense of responsibility of leading
10
Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 178 (2023) 113242
enterprises and play the leading role of leading enterprises, so as
to enhance the public’s confidence in purchasing NEVs.
(5) Future policy objectives also include actively publicizing the
potential benefits of NEVs for environmental protection and
improving the security of national energy structure, because it
helps to promote the purchase of NEVs by the public, especially
those with strong environmental awareness. In addition, a sound
battery recycling policy system should be established to eliminate
the suspicion of the environmentally-conscious public about
NEVs.
(6) In addition to providing support policies for research and devel­
opment of core technologies, to change the public’s negative at­
titudes towards the safety performance of NEVs, the government
should also improve the evaluation system for the safety and
reliability of NEVs.
The significance of this study lies in that it uses the objective research
methods such as web crawler and text mining to excavate the public
attitude and explore for the first time nationwide public attitudes to­
wards NEVs in China, providing useful insights for the Chinese gov­
ernment and automobile manufacturers to comprehensively understand
the market situation and better develop NEVs in the future. This study
also has limitations that may serve as avenues for further research. For
instance, this study only focuses on public posts on China’s social media
platform and does not pay attention to posts on Twitter, Facebook, and
other foreign social media platforms. The public’s attitudes and senti­
ments towards NEVs vary in different countries. Future studies can
evaluate and compare the public’s attitudes and sentiments on foreign
and domestic social media, and further combine the policies of various
countries to provide policy suggestions for the adoption of NEVs in
China.
Credit author statement
Zezhou Wu: Conceptualization, Methodology, Writing-Original
Draft, Supervision. Qiufeng He: Software, Writing-Original Draft,
Methodology, Visualization. Jiarun Li: Conceptualization, Writing-
Reviewing & Editing. Guoqiang Bi: Formal analysis, Writing-Reviewing
& Editing. Maxwell Fordjour Antwi-Afari: Writing-Review & Editing,
Supervision.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation
of China [grant number 72001148]; the Foundation for Basic and
Applied Basic Research of Guangdong Province [grant number
2019A1515110247]; and the Research Start-up Funding in Shenzhen
[grant number 000376].
Declaration of competing interest
The authors declare that they have no known competing financial
interests or personal relationships that could have appeared to influence
the work reported in this paper.
Data availability
The authors do not have permission to share data.
Acknowledgment
The authors thank the editors and anonymous reviewers for their
valuable and constructive suggestions for improving this paper.
Z. Wu et al. Renewable and Sustainable Energy Reviews 178 (2023) 113242

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