14 luxury car brands people love more than Tesla

Tesla Model 3

It's no secret that Tesla owners love their cars, but the general public may not share the same affection for the brand.
Tesla ranked last for positive brand perception compared to 14 other luxury car brands, according to a recent industry report.
News around the brand, including recalls and the fatal Tesla Autopilot crash, were factors that played into the low ranking.

Tesla may be one of the best known and most-loved car brands around, but that doesn't mean the company is immune to bad news.

This week NetBase unveiled its 2018 "Luxury Brands" industry report — mining data from billions of sources including social media sites, news articles, blog posts, social review sites, and forums — to discover how people feel about certain high-end brands.

In the automobile category, Tesla Motors ranked last for "net sentiment" — how positively a brand is perceived — with a score of just 36%. That's surprising, given Tesla was ranked number one on Consumer Reports 2017 Annual Owner Satisfaction Survey.

Land Rover was the most positively viewed brand, with a net sentiment score of 90%. Jaguar was the only other car brand to score below 50% for net sentiment, coming in at 44%.

Netbase Passion Index

A few factors may play into Tesla's low net sentiment score. NetBase concluded that safety is ruling the conversation for luxury car brands — something Tesla has struggled with lately.

In June 2016, news came out about the fatal Tesla Autopilot crash, which killed driver Joshua Brown the year before. And in April of 2017, Tesla recalled 53,000 of its Model S and Model X cars globally for a parking brake issue, which caused a stir on Twitter.

For better or worse, Tesla Motors is one of the most talked about brands. It landed at number three of 15 for mentions, and compared to other luxury brands in various categories — such as fashion, jewelry, and hotels — Tesla's overall brand awareness is very high.

To determine its rankings, NetBase analyzed each brand's overall performance for various factors, including: mentions (the volume of conversation happening around that brand), brand awareness (as a measure of earned impressions), reach (a measure of owned impressions), net sentiment (how positively a brand is perceived on a scale of +100% to -100%), and brand passion (the amount of emotion towards a brand). Their analysis was based on posts between January 1, 2017 to January 1, 2018 — looking at English-written posts and stories internationally.

Scroll through to see how luxury automobile brands ranked on Netbase's net sentiment score and overall mentions.

Correction: This story has been updated to reflect that news of the fatal Autopilot crash became public in 2016.