From Buzz to Bust: How Sentiment Analysis Forecasted the EV Sales Slump

Purpose of Analysis

There’s been a lot of talk lately about how EV growth forecasts aren’t looking too hot. Sales momentum has been pretty weak this year and last year, even despite top EV sellers like Tesla making huge price cuts across the board.

There’s lots to blame here for these weakening sales. For example — shortages of charging stations, rising popularity of hybrids, and growing capital costs/policy concerns being just a few. But we wanted to see whether or not changes in buyer sentiment about EV’s (specifically toward Tesla) could have predicted this slowdown. AND whether or not we could uncover any interesting patterns/trends.

The Analysis

Since car companies don’t have typical product review pages like most brands, we decided to analyze social media comments instead. To do this, we found the most viral video of each year between 2020-2024, scraped the comments, and ran them through our sentiment analysis program.

From this, we were able to graph out the proportion of negative sentiment for each video over time.

We can see that negative sentiment has been on the rise since 2020, reaching a peak of nearly 90%. But starting in 2023, it’s actually started to decline, with a HUGE decrease in 2024.

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After a deeper dive, we actually found that the primary driver of the initial negative sentiment had to do with the fact that Tesla was releasing "new models" of their cars that were essentially just rehashes of their old models. And only in 2024 did they actually release an updated model, which is exactly when we see the sudden decline in negative sentiment.

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Meaningfulness of Results

The rising negative sentiment in itself could have been a pretty big warning sign that EV’s were starting to go out of fashion long before these slowing forecasts were announced. But the biggest thing our analysis suggests is that Tesla can’t keep relying on old models of cars to appeal to new customers. Especially with every EV company out there now slashing their prices, competition in the industry is fiercer than ever — so Tesla simply can’t afford to make mistakes like these.

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Of course, there are other reasons why EV companies are struggling to attract buyers—like inconvenient charging and limited range—but it seems like there are deeper, internal issues (beyond industry-wide issues) that companies like Tesla have to address first.

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And while negative sentiment has been on the decline for Tesla, the fact that the majority of commenters still only have negative things to say about Tesla definitely isn’t a good sign. But at the end of the day, only time will tell how things actually play out in the EV industry.

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