this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
370 points (93.2% liked)
Technology
58150 readers
4652 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Doing any amount of research about the cars would bring him up. These people are spending that much without doing any research?
I just popped open an incognito window and searched "best electric cars" and checked the top ten results: all of which mentioned Tesla, and only one of which mentioned Musk. And that mention was "say what you will about...," which is fairly noncommittal about who he is or what he does. Most people aren't scrolling Reddit or Twitter or especially Lemmy all the time; they Google a question, and when they get the answer they think "oh, I've heard of a Tesla, my buddy Jeff has one" and so they go ask Jeff whether he likes it or not.
Now, in 2024, his name is probably far more recognizable. But five years ago, especially before he bought Twitter? If they did see his name, it would probably have brought associations of rockets if anything.
Or look at the Google Trends results for his name. There's a spike in May 2020 (when his baby with Grimes was born), a slight bump in 2021 when he was on SNL, and a huge spike in 2022 when he was forced to buy Twitter. Aside from that, the interest in Tesla has always been much higher than the interest in Musk, and people have been less curious about him than about Taylor Swift (for instance).
People just don't care about the CEOs of most companies they buy stuff from.
You searched top 10 EVs. If you search Tesla specifically his name and face are all over the place.
That presumes a lot more brand awareness than I think the average person has. Like I said above
—in this case, I think, "best electric car" or "electric car consumer reports" or something—
Admittedly this is just my gut reaction. But there's no really good way to test it out. "Tesla" is a tricky search term to nail down on Google Trends, since it could refer to the company or the inventor and has the confound of being searched a lot by people who are terminally online, for one reason or another. Unfortunately there's no way to select "only normies" in the viewer.