That presumes a lot more brand awareness than I think the average person has. Like I said above

Most people aren't scrolling Reddit or Twitter or especially Lemmy all the time; they Google a question

—in this case, I think, "best electric car" or "electric car consumer reports" or something—

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.

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.