Competition for a New Automobile Technology and Impact of Station Build-out

The transition from gas-powered to electric vehicles (EVs) remains a central challenge for environmental policy. Despite federal and state subsidies, EV adoption remains limited, with range anxiety—stemming from sparse charging infrastructure—acting as a key deterrent. This thesis develops and estimates a dynamic game of product entry among all automakers using parametric approximations to firms’ value functions and estimate the sunk cost of introducing a new EV model. Additionally, to account for Tesla's unique product positioning, I allow Tesla to provide exclusive charging stations for its users and estimate the annual fixed cost to maintain each station. I estimate demand from micro-data on household purchase patterns, from the National Highway Transportation Survey (NHTS), and highlight the complementarity between the size of the charging network available to a consumer and their utility from operating an EV, indicating that expanding the charging network increases consumer utility from EVs, encouraging new model introductions and amplifying EV adoption through a feedback loop between infrastructure growth and model variety. Results indicate that during the period 2010-2019, Tesla consistently had a higher likelihood of EV entry than the rest, while non-Tesla firms exhibited divergence in entry likelihoods over time. To evaluate the impact of a large scale policy expanding the network of charging stations, I conduct a counterfactual analysis simulating the National Electric Vehicle Infrastructure (NEVI) program as an unanticipated shock in 2010. Simulation results indicate that this large-scale expansion of charging infrastructure to have significantly increased model availability, accelerated EV adoption, but diminished Tesla’s market power by reducing the value of its exclusive charging network, leading to a more evenly distributed EV market.