<p>Consumers’ emotional attitudes significantly impact new energy vehicle (NEV) promotion, yet research into their preferences from this angle remains insufficient. This study adopts text mining methods to construct a NEV emotional dictionary, exploring the evolutionary characteristics, preference variations, regional heterogeneity, and key influencing factors of consumers’ emotions towards NEVs. Results reveal positive consumers focus more on NEVs’ development prospects, brand and innovative technologies, while negative ones prioritize battery performance, range, and safety. In topic evolution, positive emotional consumers sustain high attention to the development prospects of NEVs, and negative ones cling to battery technology performance. Regionally, positive emotional consumers in new first-tier cities pay the highest attention to NEVs, with significantly lower attention in second-tier and below cities. Negative emotional consumers in cities at the third tier or higher are more concerned about the installation of charging stations, whereas those in fourth and fifth-tier cities focus on battery life. Among the related factors, the development of charging facilities and per capita disposable income are the key factors that significantly affect consumers’ emotions, while NEV purchase subsidies have no significant impact on consumers’ emotions. Therefore, efforts should be made to enhance battery R&amp;D as well as charging infrastructure, adopt tiered urban promotion strategies, and advance the development of innovative technologies such as intelligent connectivity to enhance consumers’ acceptance.</p>