Social Presence Showdown: Choosing the Best Electric Car

You’ve all seen the movies. In the future, we’ll be doing the weekly shop in flying cars.

While we’re still a little while off that brilliant reality (sadly), another future invention is already upon us: the electric car.

This relatively young niche of the automotive industry has sparked into life in the last few years, with an increasing number of models now available.

We’ve taken a look at the three most popular electric cars in the US, and plugged them into Brandwatch to see if social has picked its best electric car.

All of the below charts were taken from Brandwatch Analytics, looking at social data from January 1st 2015 – December 31st 2015.

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Total mentions

Despite the Nissan LEAF being the world’s all-time best-selling all-electric car, it trails behind the Tesla S in mentions in every week but two.

In November, Nissan tested a self-driving version of the LEAF, helping to push the mention count above the Tesla for the first time since the start of the year, when all three cars were running neck and neck.

The LEAF narrowly gains more mentions than the i3, but it’s a close-run thing.

Tesla’s regular large spikes in conversation are driven by specific news stories, including its own autonomous version and the addition of a ‘Ludicrous’ driving mode.

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Sentiment analysis

While the Tesla S dominates in pure mentions, it lags behind in terms of sentiment, with the lowest positive score of 76.2%.

The BMW i3 finishes the year with 88.3% positive sentiment, beating the Nissan LEAF into second place with 80.9% positive.

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Gender analysis

While all three cars are clearly dominated by male conversation, it’s the Tesla that gains the highest percentage of man-talk.

Men account for 75% of the conversation, compared to 64.9 for the BMW and 66.7 for the Nissan.

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Associated features

Using Brandwatch Analytics categorization capabilities we were able to understand the kind of language people use when talking about these three car models.

Uncovering which features are most associated with your product can give brands an understanding of how their marketing is being received, and highlight areas that they may wish to focus on.

The Tesla dominates on multiple fronts. Words associated with acceleration, power and speed are all heavily weighted towards Tesla, taking over 90% in five separate categories.

A 7.3% share of the conversation around fuel efficiency is the main concern, but the model does receive a lot of mentions around range and battery life.

Tesla would want to investigate further to see why this apparent contradiction exists in consumer’s minds.

The Nissan LEAF comes away with one win, in the heavy duty category with 58.3% of the mentions. Worryingly, it also has five categories where it scores less than 2%: the words associated with power and speed, in addition to luxury.

Finally, the BMW i3 takes the win for the most fuel efficient.

It fails to pick up much conversation around the speed categories of MPH, acceleration and speed. For the economically and environmentally minded, this may be the electric car model of choice, and an opportunity for BMW to highlight this message in their marketing.