Making the future present: Corporate imaginaries of intelligent automobility

Abstract

The study examines corporate imaginaries of intelligent vehicles in China, focusing on how automakers articulate and stabilize a desired vision of the mobility future. Drawing on sociotechnical imaginaries, the study demonstrates that intelligent vehicles are promoted as future-oriented technologies that enable technological aspirations, social interactions, and political ambitions, thereby shaping how the imagined future is experienced and perceived in the present. The analysis of 12 leading automakers reveals three discursive strategies for making the future present: rendering the future simultaneously mythic and attainable; embedding the future into everyday life through affective, automating, and infrastructural practices; and advancing a techno-nationalist vision of the future. These strategies collapse the boundary between future and present, positioning intelligent automobility as both already realized and the only possible trajectory forward. The findings demonstrate how companies construct imaginaries in which technological progress, user experience, and political considerations converge to produce actionable visions of the future.

Keywords

sociotechnical imaginaries the future intelligent vehicles automobility corporate communications

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