As regions around the world have transitioned towards sustainability at varying pace, the adoption of low-carbon mobility technologies like electric vehicles (EVs) remains greatly uneven. While infrastructure, costs and technological readiness plays a crucial role in adoption decision; people’s experiences, expectations and existing habits also shape mobility transition decisions. Given the urgent need to decarbonize the transport sector, behaviorally informed interventions can reduce the stickiness of existing habits and speed up sustainability transitions. Drawing on Bamberg’s Stage Regulated Behavior Change (SRBC) model, this study administers interventions based on the mental accounting framework (decision budgeting), using a vignette (hypothetical scenario)-based stated choice experiment. Such an approach can be particularly suitable for regions with very limited exposure to EVs or with underdeveloped charging infrastructure at present, as in several rapidly urbanizing smaller cities in India. Mental accounting principles were embedded in the experiment to capture how current psychological resource allocation-consumption mechanisms are associated with future mobility choices. The experiment was administered to 787 participants, aged 18-25, sampled through convenience sampling, and randomly assigned to a control group or three intervention groups. Using multinomial logit regression, this study finds that the violation of key mental accounting principles is associated with differentiated behavioral stages towards sustainability. Violation of the fungibility principle for spending towards necessity is 5.36–7.83 times more likely to be associated with the pre-decision stage, while those violating the fungibility principle for indulgence has a 59.59 times higher likelihood of being in the action stage of behavior. Violation of the labeling principle decreases the likelihood of pre-decision or pre-action, except when indulgence involves green investments, which increases the likelihood of the pre-action stage by 5.26–7.679 times. Such interventions based on mental accounting principles can help identify potential early adopters of EVs in the near future for presently lesser developed but rapidly urbanizing smaller cities in India.