With the rapid expansion of the new energy vehicle (NEV) market, charging and battery swapping have emerged as the two principal energy replenishment modes, and differences in consumer preferences toward these two options have attracted increasing attention from both academia and industry. Drawing on user-generated content (UGC), this paper investigates consumers’ preference characteristics for electric vehicle charging and battery swapping and identifies the key factors influencing their choices. A total of 3,009 user comments were collected from three major online platforms, namely Autohome, Dongchedi, and Zhihu. Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling was employed to extract key themes, and the optimal number of topics was determined to be 9. In addition, Snow NLP was used to examine sentiment distributions across topics, while random forest feature selection was applied to identify the most influential factors shaping consumer preferences. The results show that consumer concerns regarding charging and battery swapping are mainly concentrated in 9 dimensions: Battery Performance, Vehicle Structure, Equipment Safety, Energy Replenishment Efficiency, Service Experience, Range-related Cost, Policy Subsidies, Infrastructure Construction, and Brand Ecosystem. Sentiment analysis further indicates that consumers hold more positive attitudes toward battery swapping in terms of Energy Replenishment Efficiency, while expressing greater concern about charging with respect to Equipment Safety and Infrastructure Construction. Moreover, the random forest results reveal that Equipment Safety, Brand Ecosystem, and Infrastructure Construction are the most critical factors affecting consumer preferences. These findings provide useful insights for optimizing energy replenishment services and promoting the coordinated development of charging and battery swapping systems.
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