Yahoo Autos Polestar Is Building a Performance EV Brand Without Going Racing
Polestar's name comes from a racing team. Before it was a standalone electric car brand, Polestar was Volvo's factory-backed entry in the Swedish Touring Car Championship. Volvo eventually bought the team, spun its street-car tuning arm into a standalone brand, then transitioned that into an all-electric car company that's becoming less and less recognizable as a cousin of Volvo by the month. Somewhere along the way, racing stopped being a priority for Polestar.
While CEO Thomas Ingenlath sees value in racing, he does not envision Polestar returning to the track any time soon. Instead, he's devoting the company's research and development resources toward improving the driving experience in upcoming cars.
"Building cars for driving, and not for racing, is our home," Ingenlath told Road & Track. "Let's face it, the amount of energy, the amount of development capacity, the money we put into developing our production cars... We have to concentrate on that. As much as I might love racing, it would be the wrong focus for our brand to go now and race. The relevance for what our customer can experience in the day-to-day life of the car, it's too much of a gap."
As an all-electric brand, Polestar would have few opportunities to enter competition anyway: The racing world still dominated by internal combustion. Formula E might be one logical entry point, but that series uses spec chassis components and restricts automaker creativity to the electric motors. That makes it an odd fit for Polestar, a brand focused more on user experience than lap times.
"[T]here is some technology learning and transfer possible from what you learn in racing to car production," Ingenlath told R&T. "Having said that, the relation is not in the right proportion for us at the moment."
That puts Polestar in an odd place, but one that makes a lot of sense for an electric performance brand. Sure, EVs can put down world-beating quarter mile times and set lap records, but Polestar's focus is less on performance numbers and more on the experience that performance gives a driver. This is the core premise of the recently-revealed O2 concept, a car that takes the inherent strengths of the company's new bonded aluminum spaceframe platform and applies them to a grand touring cabriolet rather than a supercar or speedy sedan. The final product, when it arrives in showrooms, is expected to have the massive power and immediate torque delivery we've come to expect from a premium EV, but the concept was revealed without any target performance numbers.
That's the future of electric performance as Polestar sees it, built around the driving sensations an electric drivetrain can offer to a driver. For now, Polestar thinks it can offer the most by developing grand tourers and sport sedans without sending them into competition.
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