Tesla is the only EV brand with negative perception, and it’s getting worse

Tesla is the only EV brand with a net negative brand perception, according to the Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report – and much of the negative shift has happened in the last 6 months.

The Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report (EVIR) surveyed 8,000 US consumers to ask them questions about electric vehicle purchasing decisions, both asking about brands and finding out what they value in an EV purchase.

The most notable result of the survey is that consumers had the most negative view of Tesla – and in fact, Tesla is the only brand in the survey which received a net negative brand image.

When asked whether they have a positive or negative view of Tesla, 32% said they have a “very” or “somewhat” positive view combined, but 39% said they have a “very” or “somewhat” negative view.

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This means Tesla has a -7% net score, behind even VinFast, which has a 0% net score (mostly because most surveyed hadn’t heard of the Vietnamese brand).

As for other brands, ironically, the top-ranked EV brand was Honda, a company that only sells one full BEV in the US, the Prologue (which people like and is selling great), which it didn’t even make itself, but rather made it in partnership with GM. Chevrolet scored well also, third place overall in brand perception.

The other EV startups (Lucid, Rivian, Polestar) did tend towards the bottom of the table, but this was largely because they had comparatively lower brand awareness, and thus their net positive numbers could not have been much higher (Lucid, for example, had 9% positive and 4% negative scores). Tesla, however, had both extremely high brand awareness and negative brand association. (But you have heard of me…)

Tesla’s score gets even worse when “view intensity” is taken into account, with people 13 points more likely to have a “very negative” view than a “very positive” one.

This negative brand perception persisted through all income brackets, regions and ages, with Tesla holding last place in each category.

In every category save one, when asked whether they would consider purchasing a Tesla, the most common answer was “would never consider.”

Tesla also ranked last in a comparison of various home EV charger brands and home battery brands, with more consumers saying they “would never consider” it.

Similar numbers appeared in a question about “brand trust,” where Tesla again had negative net trust, and a much higher “distrust a lot” score than its “trust a lot” score.

Tesla performed slightly better in perceptions of safety (second last) and family-friendliness (fourth from last), but did well in perceptions of luxury, holding fifth place overall out of eighteen brands.

According to this survey, the drop in Tesla brand perception has been quite recent. EVIR asked how views of Tesla had changed over the last 6 months. 46% said their opinion hadn’t changed, but a total of 38% of people had a “more” or “much more” negative perception, versus 16% who had a “more” or “much more” positive perception.

This, again, becomes more of a severe difference when you look at the most intense answers: 27% had a “much more negative” perception, while only 6% had a “much more positive” perception – a 4.5x difference.

Overall, over the last 6 months, there was only a +1% net change in consumers positive perceptions of EVs as a whole, so this drastic recent change was limited to Tesla, not other brands.

There was one piece of good news for Tesla, though: when asked which sort of public charging equipment consumers would most prefer, Tesla came out on top… except it also came out on top of the list that consumers would least prefer.

EVIR also asked what the factors driving consumers’ interest or disinterest in purchasing an EV.

Consumers recognized the benefits of EVs, with the top factors driving EV interest being gas savings, environment/climate change, and the ability to charge at home. Consumers who were already considering buying an EV found these to be more important factors than consumers who said they aren’t thinking about an EV yet.

Unfortunately, consumers also fell victim to the myths they’ve long been told about EVs. We’ve seen for a long time that consumers claim that range is one of their main concerns with EVs, despite that there are plenty of EVs available with way more range than you actually need.

In the EVIR, consumers ranked “length of range on a battery charge” as their top concern, even though EVs on average have enough range for a full week worth of driving from the average driver.

The second and fourth concerns, “availability of charging stations” and “I couldn’t charge at my residence” are much more pertinent. While it’s common for non-EV drivers not to recognize how many chargers are available, this is an area where the EV industry could definitely improve (I’ve long been on record saying that charger availability, especially for apartment dwellers and street parkers, is the only real problem with EVs – and that solving these problems will help people recognize that giant range numbers are not as necessary as they think).

Happily, the NACS transition will help to solve a lot of these problems, along with the existence of new well-funded charging networks like IONNA.

You can check out the full Electric Vehicle Intelligence Report here.

Electrek’s Take

As we’ve been warning people about for quite some time now, Tesla CEO Elon Musk is doing his best to completely destroy Tesla’s brand.

As an EV publication, we have the same mission as Tesla – to advance sustainable transport. In order for that to happen, we obviously want the (formerly) largest EV company in the world to do its job the best it can.

The problem is, Musk doesn’t have that mission, and has been doing his best over the last year(s) to ruin Tesla’s brand perception with increasingly idiotic decisions, both in terms of his public advocacy and his work within Tesla.

Musk’s high-profile political advocacy, which has included support for German neo-Nazis and agreeing with a defense of Hitler’s actions in the Holocaust, among many other white supremacist statements, has driven protests against the company, embarrassed owners and pushed many customers away.

This report shows the effect of the constant drumbeat of bad Tesla business moves and horrendous public behavior by the company’s CEO. The company’s employees, for the most part, are still working to try to make good electric vehicles, but Musk is spending the money he made from selling EVs to try to ruin EVs – something that the company itself had to call him out on in its quarterly report (and which the formerly-more-lucid Musk would have opposed just a few years ago before he forgot how climate change works).

Unfortunately, Tesla’s board seems content to destroy the company, and its shareholders do too, as they voted again last year to give Musk $55 billion in exchange for his bad leadership, an award that is greater than the total amount of profits Tesla has made over its entire lifetime. That pay package was stopped by a court for violating corporate law.

We’re not sure what’s going to many any of them wake up to Musk’s destruction of the company, but this report is just one more data point showing how severe the situation has gotten.

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