On Thursday, Tesla got people wondering about the abrupt suspension of sales of their cars. If you wanted to buy a car and pressed the buying button it directed you to a teaser page that looked like this:
Two days earlier, Elon Musk sorta announced that something will happen on Thursday at 2 pm. At first, people thought that the tweet was about his ongoing legal troubles, so he clarified later in a thread that the tweet was actually about Tesla.
It wasn’t long before people started speculating what the announcement was going to be about.
Some pages even made polls so the people can predict what’s going to happen.
In the end, Tesla delivered on the 2016 promise that they’ll cut the Model 3 price to US$35,000. The previous cheapest Model 3 was US$42,900. This price cut didn’t come without some consequences. In a statement, Musk announced that they’ll shift all sales online and close the majority of their stores.
The reaction
The news, expectedly, caused a spike in the number of mentions of Tesla which you can see in the graph below. Tesla was overall mentioned over 370 000 times with the number of impressions going up to 4.5 billion.
As you can see from the graph below, 50.8% of the mentions were from Twitter, followed by Web.
Furthermore, Tesla caught the interest and sparked conversation all over the world. As expected, it was predominately discussed in the USA with the number of mentions going up to 211,542, followed by Spain (21,347), Italy (17,725), and Russia (17,679).
The new Model 3 was also discussed a lot, with the number of mentions reaching over 24,000. As you can see from the chart below, people had overall positive reactions to the new Tesla car. There were 61.9% of positive mentions and 38.1% negative mentions.
The news was covered by major news outlets such as BBC News, CNN, The New York Times, Reuters, and many more.
Later in 2019, Tesla had another launch that was also highly anticipated – the Cybertruck launch. Funny enough, something that was supposed to be one of the strengths of the car (bulletproof windows) became the biggest fail during the demonstration.
In conclusion
Be that as it may, according to our data, Tesla launches attract much more online chatter than this year’s Geneva Motor Show, for example. To be fair, the Geneva Auto Show was canceled due to coronavirus, but before that, it didn’t get close to the number of mentions Tesla’s launches had.
Musk has the talent of generating people’s and media attraction in everything he does, which proves to be a big asset when it comes to promoting his products.
The question remains: “What’s he going to do next?”