Car fleet modelling : Data processing and discrete choice model estimation

Abstract: This thesis deals with the modelling of the choice of new car based on the registration data of the whole Sweden car fleet for 2005 to 2010. It is divided into two parts. In the first part, to obtain the observations of new car choices for the discrete choice modelling, a subset based on the first registration date of each car is extracted. Then, a descriptive analysis based on the new car choice data is presented to find the variances of the attributes for the modelling. Specifically, two major issues are paid attention to. One is the change of market share of each car make in these years and the other is the incremental demand of diesel and hybrid fuel cars. The second part of the thesis deals with the discrete choice modelling. In order to designate the alternatives, another dataset showing the new car supply in Sweden is introduced. In the supply data, the alternatives are shown in the car version level, whereas the registration data only contain the names of car models. Additionally, the supply data also have some attributes that are unavailable in the registration, e.g. price. Thus, this thesis presents various matching methods to match the supply and the registration to define the alternatives for the modelling and also to obtain a higher precision of each attribute than that in matching with model names only. Finally, we choose to match the data by the same model name with the same maximum power, which is defined as the “model-engine” level. Therefore, based on these model-engine level alternatives, 18 MNL models are estimated from 2005 to 2010, with 3 different ownerships, namely private owned, company owned and company owned but leasing to its employee which is named as “leasing users”. The results show the slump of the brand constants of Saab among these years in private owners and leasing users due to the close-down crisis when the coefficient of Volvo is fixed to zero. By contrast, the brand value of Kia for private owners and the value of VW for leasing users go up. Meanwhile, this thesis analyses a shift of car buyers’ attitude to the alternative fuel car from negative in 2006 to positive in 2007 when a “clean car” compensation policy is implemented from Jan. 2007 to Jul. 2009. And in 2010, the coefficient of the alternative fuel remains positive. These results indicate that this policy was quite successful.