Sustainable operations in electric vehicles’ sharing: behavioral patterns and carbon emissions with digital technologies

Sustainable operation is a way that comprehensively considers the harmonious development of environment, economy and society. However, the research on electric vehicles’ sharing (EVS) in sustainable operation is still relatively scarce. In the context of carbon neutrality, it is worth exploring how to use digital technologies to analyze behavioral patterns and carbon emissions in EVS. Thus, this paper employed a large-scale travel record data set collected by in-vehicle sensors, which covered 1.03 million records of 3100 vehicles in Shenzhen, China. The behavioral patterns and motivations of EVS were identified. People usually think that EVS is mostly used for short-distance travel, but the results show that short distances did not bring low-carbon benefits. The carbon emissions per unit mileage of these patterns are even higher than that of fuel vehicles. On the contrary, the long-distance travel patterns have the best emission reduction effects. Shared travel in urban traffic is mostly concentrated in commercial and residential areas, not only in the morning and evening peaks, but also in the noon. And the usage on weekends and holidays has increased significantly. Interestingly, we found that a group of users usually go to public transportation locations to continue low-carbon travel.