The new energy vehicle’s research and development competition with technology uncertainty under dual credit policy

The dual-credit policy is a market-based mechanism designed to reduce carbon emissions from the automotive industry by promoting new energy vehicles (NEVs) and restricting fuel vehicles (FVs). This study provides a low-carbon operations perspective on how such a policy interacts with technological uncertainty and market competition to shape NEV R&D strategies and, crucially, the resulting carbon emission reductions. We develop a game-theoretic newsvendor framework that endogenizes FV market decay and incorporates a usage-phase carbon accounting model aligned with IPCC guidelines. Under imperfect competition, we decompose the marginal carbon impact of the credit price into four driven forces: quality improvement, competitive spillover, market contraction interaction, and output incentive. We show that a higher credit price reduces total emissions only when the energy-efficiency for the quality improvement of NEVs is sufficiently large. Under perfect competition, the FV shrinkage acceleration effect dominates, but excessive credit price may paradoxically increase emissions by crowding out the FVM’s own NEV yield. We further derive equilibrium R&D quality, yield, and launch-timing strategies, and demonstrate through Difference-in-Differences analysis of 2019–2024 production data that the policy significantly accelerated NEV adoption. Numerical studies reveal that perfect competition and technological progress can substitute for policy incentives, suggesting a transition from policy-driven to technology-driven decarbonization. These findings provide a low-carbon policy roadmap: maintaining moderate credit prices, pairing price adjustments with energy-efficiency standards, and enacting mandatory FV phase-out schedules to align the dual-credit policy with net-zero goals.