Towards a circular economy for end-of-life vehicles management in Thailand

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Abstract:

Thailand, the largest automobile production hub in Southeast Asia, is at a crossroads towards sustainable development goals. On the one hand, policy makers keen to upgrade the Thai automotive industry to a hub of electric vehicle and to explore how to handle old cars to prevent negative externalities. This research will discuss the ongoing policy formulation towards a sustainable development and put more emphasis on the latter issue because in transforming to a new industry, we cannot neglect the existing and old technogy cars. Despite Thailand's automotive policies have been successful in upgrading the inudstry to occupy the world 11th rank in global automobile production in 2019, there was no regulation or mechanism to manage vehicles properly when they reached the final stage. There are concerns over the growing number of old cars on the road and the improper treatement of end-of-life vehicles (ELVs), jeopardizing road safety and environment problems. Thai customers tend to use car longer than 15 years because of the old institutional factors, i.e., tax structure, registration tax, motor-vehicle tax (Techakanont 2020). Based on questionnaire survey on car owners, we analysed customers' awareness and acceptance of personnel regarding the implementation of ELV policy and to examine factors related to the personnel’s awareness and acceptance in the ELV policy. Path Analysis using maximum likelihood estimation was run to examine the hypotheses. The results showed that two factors significantly related to acceptance of personnel regarding the implementation of ELV policy were individual factors, knowledge and understanding of ELV, and awareness of ELV is important factor to enhance their acceptance of Thai people.