While the electric vehicle sector is often spoken of as a relatively homogenous entity, the truth is that there’s not necessarily that much overlap between buyers of a Tesla Model S, a Nissan LEAF, a Mahindra e2o, and a BMW i3.
So, if that’s the case, where and what exactly are the distinctions between the buyers of the various electric vehicles (EVs)? An article published recently over at Business 2 Community examined those questions — focusing specifically on the differences between those interested in Tesla’s products and those interested in the Chevy Volt (and likely the Chevy Bolt as well).
The comparison — made using the Affinio Marketing Intelligence Platform — shows what most astute observers would have already guessed: much of the interest in Tesla’s products appears to be driven by prestige and its wider association with the tech industry. (I’m sure that the high quality of the company’s products plays a substantial part as well, of course. But the wider “love” coming from the media and others is at this point partly the result of what the company represents socially and culturally.)
Here are some excerpts from the aforementioned coverage:
To learn more about which car is dominating in ideal ‘EV’ communities, we ran a competitive analysis between @TeslaMotors and @ChevyVolt to understand further. In this analysis, we combined the followers of these accounts and ran an Affinio segmentation analysis. From there, we can understand who is ‘winning’ in each interest-based cluster.
It is interesting to note that Chevy dominates in the ‘Sustainability’ community. You might assume that they would be somewhat split here. Clearly, Chevy has the stronger following in this community. They also dominate in the ‘Auto Industry’, which is not a surprise based on the audience analysis from above. The two EV makers are fairly split in ‘Business’ and ‘Movie + Entertainment’ communities while Tesla dominated in ‘Tech Founders’ and ‘Space + Science’. This obviously has a lot to do with Tesla’s co-founder, Elon Musk. Musk is also the founder, CEO, and CTO of SpaceX, and co-founder of Paypal.
I would expect that this disparity will become more and more pronounced following the Model 3 release, and the release of the models following.
(Tip of the hat to “saltsman” on the GM Volt forum.)
Image Credit: Business 2 Community
Volt = Auto Parts and Repair
You can’t fight safety glass, seat belts, pollution controls, rapid transit systems and grind up EV’s and still be loved by people wanting a better world.
Some think they can…. and no doubt the Bolt will help them re-write their history!
GM fans didn’t watch “Who killed the electric car?”
Ironically it was that movie that started Musk dreaming about EVs.