From its motorsport beginnings to today, Swedish electric automaker Polestar has come a long way. According to CEO Thomas Ingenlath, the Volvo spin off is just getting started.
Ingenlath, along with members of the automaker’s leadership team, laid out a three-year plan for Polestar during a presentation in New York on Thursday that included an ambitious sales goal and a peek at its next electric vehicle.
“Cars are a very highly emotional affair,” Ingenlath said as he kicked off his pitch to media.
Polestar 3 electric vehicle teased at an event in December 2021. Image credit: Polestar
At its core, the plan is to launch three new vehicles by 2024, expand the number of vehicles sold to about 290,000 units, and do so in new markets across Europe and Asia Pacific. The foundations for this expansion are the company’s own core values of design, sustainability, innovation and customer engagement.
Sustainability in particular was emphasized during the event, with Polestar reaffirming its mission to produce a carbon neutral car by 2030. This will be dependent on a number of sustainable practices big and small, from using recycled materials to changing how Polestar does business on the supply chain level.
We know very little about the upcoming Polestars 3 and 4, though Ingenlath insisted the ball was rolling on production of both, even offering a teaser image of the 3 to whet the EV aficionados’ appetites. The all-electric SUV will be built in the United States, specifically in Charleston, South Carolina.
Along with being produced in a climate-responsible manner, the Polestar 3 will also be equipped with hardware from lidar developer Luminar and Nvidia-sourced processors to make its advanced driver assistance system capable of automated driving on highways, though it seems this feature won’t be available at launch.
Little beyond that is known of the 3 and even less of the Polestar 4, though it’s billed as a premium sport SUV “Coupe,” with a more rakish fastback profile, according to the teaser graphics displayed during the presentation. Polestar has also used the Porsche Cayenne and Macan as price-point benchmarks for the 3 and 4 respectively, so we can infer that these competitors also set the bar for the level of luxury and performance both cars intend to challenge.
Interestingly, the car we know the most about is the furthest one away: the Polestar 5.
It was recently announced that the Precept Concept will indeed go into full production as the 5th Polestar, a four-door luxury sport GT. As it stands, the Precept is in a way a physical declaration of Polestar’s future and will inform the upcoming SUVs as well.
The jump from 29,000 units sold to 290,000 in three years sounds daunting, as well as increasing Polestar’s presence, but Ingenlath isn’t worried. “From here on in, Polestar is all about growth.”
With its production already underway, we’ll likely hear more about the Polestar 3 sooner than later.
