Honda Motor Co is the latest automobile company facing negative buzz after a major product recall. Honda announced on Monday it was recalling more than 428,000 vehicles because of a defect that could cause the cars to roll away if they are parked incorrectly. The recall includes primarily Accord, Civic, Element models.

The sentiment chart below shows Honda cruising along at above 80% positive Internet chatter sentiment in the month leading up to the recall. Negative chatter immediately spiked above positive chatter after the recall news broke.

Positive chatter seems to be on the rise and negative chatter seems to be on the decline today, though. And looking at an overall buzz trend chart below, there was not an increase in overall chatter due to the recall. In fact, overall Honda chatter spiked in mid July.

Upon further investigation using Social Radar, we clicked on the peak point to get more information.

A quick look at the topic cloud for Honda during the peak in chatter reveals the terms ‘plug-in hybrid’ and ’2012′ were used most frequently.

Analysis on the term ‘plug-in hybrid’ shows that the term was used in 9% of all Honda-related posts that day, and mentioned an average of 2.2 times per post — with 97% of the mentions being positive. Related topics include ‘electric car’ and ‘Ito’.

Further analysis shows us the top influential sources that created these posts:

As well as a full list of posts:

We quickly found a post on the popular blog Engadget regarding Honda CEO Takanobu Ito’s formal announcement of plans to produce a plug-in hybrid competitor for Toyota’s flashy new PHEV Prius by 2012.

So the good news for Honda is that their announcement to produce the hybrid plug-ins generated more buzz overall than the recall.

For additional information or analysis, visit http://infegy.com/socialradar.