The Importance of Being Right: Projectivity and Discourse around Electric Cars

• In Event: Sociology of Culture Section Roundtables
  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): 12. Ecological Futures & Climate Activism

Abstract

How do different groups imagine the same future and why do their visions diverge? This paper argues that the purpose of a prediction shapes its content: who is projecting, for whom, and toward what end determines how futures are constructed and revised over time. I examine this through electric vehicle (EV) discourse in U.S. trade journals and newspapers from 1990 to 2024, a period spanning California's zero-emission mandate, the launch of the Tesla Roadster, Dieselgate, and EVs' emergence as mass-market reality. Drawing on Ann Mische's framework of projectivity, I analyze three dimensions of future-making: reach (how far ahead predictions extend), contingency (how certain or conditional they are), and connectivity (how future events are causally linked). I use a mixed-methods approach, combining computational text analysis of nearly 100,000 documents and qualitative coding of salient years to compare how these dimensions evolved across two outlets with distinct audiences and stakes. Findings reveal that trade journalists, writing for investors and industry insiders, grew increasingly cautious as the technology matured, hedging predictions and shortening horizons. Newspaper journalists, writing for a broader public, maintained speculative, long-horizon language throughout. This was due to the different stakes of being wrong: a bad trade-press prediction could redirect capital; a newspaper prediction would simply age poorly. However, outlets converged on connectivity logics, especially on when they were more likely to theorize future events, following stabilities and instabilities around EV production. While having different purposes, predictions could never be disentangled from the material properties of EVs. This suggests that future projections are fundamentally practical: shaped by purpose, audience, and consequence, and always tethered to the material world unfolding around them.

Author

• Maddalena Simeon, University of Toronto