Reaction to Tesla
Tesla Self-Driving Video
This past month (April 2018), Tesla released a video of their "full" (level 4 AV) self-driving mode. The video attracted immediate global attention with over four million views in this short time period. As one of the main proponents of AV technology, Tesla is at the forefrunt of media when it comes to self-driving cars despite not actually having the most developed AV features. Regardless, Tesla and the firm's actions remain a large presence in the public eye.
After scraping the YouTube comments of this video, I analyzed the sentiment of the text. The overall sentiment score of the comments was 0.1678, which is pretty positive even with Tesla's previous two fatal crashes. In addition, I looked at the change in sentiment of the comments over time as displayed in the graph. Everyday since the release, the video has garnered mixed but considerable reaction. Even more so with Tesla, we see greater disparity between the sentiment reactions. With Tesla's staunch fame comes equal backlash.
Finally, I created a word cloud of the most common words from the comments divided by positive and negative sentiment. In contrast to the other videos, people seem more in awe at the AV potential of Tesla vehicles with words such as 'cool,' 'amazing,' and 'wow.' At the same time, the Tesla video faces other aspects of scrutiny besides the typical 'crashes' and 'death' comments. The negative words feature 'expensive,' 'hack', and 'illegal,' demonstrating a broader set of concerns that come with Tesla self-driving.
Tesla Stock Prices
In addition to analyzing the sentiment of the Tesla video comments, I also examined how Tesla stock prices correlate with poor news reaction from self-driving car crashes.
With Tesla's first fatality in autopilot mode publicized in late June, we see a distinct drop in their share price in the first graph. This is rather straight forward since the incident is a direct reflection of Tesla itself. But what if bad events happen to other companies?
The second graph is the share price of Tesla during the major Uber pedestrian fatality on March 18th. During this time interval, Tesla stock is already experiencing a downhill trend followed by a steeper drop after the Uber crash. Tesla's share price takes an even large hit after March 23rd, which was when their second driver fatality occurred.
The last graph shows Tesla's stock price around the less severe crash by Waymo, which was publicized on October 2nd. Again, during this day Tesla's stock price is already in the midst of a decline. However, it seems that after the news, Tesla's stock price takes a steeper dive. Although we cannot attribute causation to these changes, we can see that Tesla stock price is correlated to other firms' AV events.
As company stock prices can serve as a proxy for general market sentiment for a firm, these indicators show that AV news correlate with Tesla stock prices. Despite having a focus on electric vehicles and not being one of the main leaders in AV technology, Tesla is not immune to the greater public sentiment of self-driving cars.