Do Facilitating Conditions Really Matter After Adoption? Evidence from Electric Vehicle Continuance Intention in Kerala

Abstract

The rapid growth of electric vehicle (EV) adoption has shifted scholarly and policy attention from initial acceptance to the challenge of sustaining long-term use. While facilitating conditions such as charging infrastructure, service support, and institutional facilitation are widely acknowledged as critical drivers of EV adoption, their relevance in the post-adoption stage remains theoretically ambiguous. This study examines whether facilitating conditions continue to matter after adoption in shaping the continuance behaviour of EV users in Kerala, an emerging regional market characterized by progressive EV policies alongside uneven infrastructural development. Anchored in post-adoption theory and the expectation–confirmation framework, the study conceptualizes EV continuance behaviour as a cognitive–affective–behavioural process linking facilitating conditions, confirmation, satisfaction, and continuance intention.

A quantitative, cross-sectional research design was employed, and primary data were collected from 379 privately owned four-wheeler EV users in Kerala with a minimum of six months of usage experience. Purposive sampling was used to ensure that respondents possessed sufficient post-adoption experience to evaluate infrastructural and experiential factors meaningfully. The data were analysed using Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM), enabling the assessment of measurement reliability and validity, as well as the testing of direct, indirect, and serial mediation effects.

The results reveal that facilitating conditions do not exert a significant direct influence on continuance intention among EV users in Kerala. Instead, facilitating conditions significantly enhance confirmation of expectations, which strongly increases satisfaction, and satisfaction, in turn, emerges as the most powerful predictor of continuance intention. Mediation analysis confirms a full serial mediation effect, indicating that facilitating conditions affect EV continuance behaviour only through the sequential mechanism of confirmation and satisfaction. Alternative direct and single-step indirect pathways are weak or insignificant, underscoring the dominance of experiential evaluations over infrastructural factors in the post-adoption phase.

These findings suggest that facilitating conditions function as enabling or hygiene factors rather than as direct motivators of continued EV use. In the Kerala context, infrastructure and support systems matter insofar as they validate users’ expectations and contribute to positive usage experiences, but they are insufficient on their own to sustain long-term EV usage. The study contributes to the post-adoption and EV literature by empirically demonstrating the indirect and conditional role of facilitating conditions and by highlighting the centrality of satisfaction in driving continuance behaviour. From a policy and managerial perspective, the results imply that efforts to promote sustained electric mobility should prioritize infrastructure reliability, service quality, and user experience, rather than focusing solely on expanding infrastructural capacity.