Analysing perceptions towards electric cars using text mining and sentiment analysis: A case study of the newly introduced TOGG in Turkey

The electric car market is growing steadily around the world and, accordingly, has become an attractive research area. It is important to understand the consumer perspective on newly introduced electric cars, such as those of Turkey’s Automobile Joint Venture Group Inc. (TOGG). Thus, the purpose of this study is to provide a better understanding of consumers’ perceptions related to the newly introduced TOGG, which may create a competitive advantage. Social media is an abundant source of textual data that allows for very reliable analysis and understanding of consumer opinions. In this study, Twitter comments on TOGG were collected and studied. Text mining, sentiment analysis and topic model analysis were then conducted. The results show that TOGG is a popular product with the public: there are many more positive Twitter comments related to TOGG than negative ones. The topics identified in social media are price expectancy, production facility, design and features. The most frequent topic for both positive and negative comments is price expectancy.