'A V8 is not a positive image anymore': Why Swedish EV brand Polestar says you might want to rethink your next petrol or diesel car purchase

Polestar, the new all-electric brand spun-off from Volvo and Geely, has big goals to build the world’s first truly carbon-neutral vehicle by 2030 – but it says it won’t be an easy task, and that just going electric won’t solve the industry’s problems.

The brand’s first mass-market model, the Polestar 2, which arrives in Australia early next year, is shaping up as our market’s most sustainable vehicle, with the Swedish newcomer being the first to issue a lifecycle assessment report for the car.

The LCA report traces as many CO2 emissions as possible, following everything from raw materials to the source of charging power to determine the vehicle’s ultimate carbon footprint, informing buyers how many kilometres it will take for it to ‘break even’ with an equivalent internal-combustion model (in the LCA report, an ICE Volvo XC40 is used as the example).

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The brand is open about the fact that there is a high carbon cost for building batteries for electric cars, and thus, depending on the power mix of your country, it will take many tens of thousands of kilometres for the Polestar 2 to start breaking even with its ICE counterparts.

In the case of Australia, where much of the power mix comes from fossil fuel sources, that distance is estimated to be around 112,000km.

With transparency being front of mind, though, the brand’s executives had more to say on why this was such a big challenge for the industry.

“The car industry isn’t ‘going wrong’, per se – electrification is seen as the solution to our climate crisis, while not being clear to the customer that electrification is just the first step toward sustainability,” explained Polestar’s CEO, Thomas Ingenlath.

“The industry needs to make sure that everyone understands you need to also charge your car with green energy, you need to be confident about the fact that an electric car has a CO2 burden.

Polestar is up front about the fact that there is a major CO2 burden for building an EV.

“We have to strive to reduce this when it comes to producing electric cars, everything from supply chain to raw materials needs improvement. There are still OEMs investing in legacy technology – this is something we can push an agenda on as a pure EV brand.”

Polestar is using many new techniques to attempt to bring down its supply chain carbon footprint, from recycled water and green power at its factories, to using new blockchain technologies to trace the raw materials used in the construction of its vehicles.

It promises future vehicles will be comprised of even more extensively recycled and renewable materials, from reclaimed aluminium in the frames (a material which made new currently accounts for more than 40 per cent of the Polestar 2’s carbon footprint), flax-based cloth, and interior plastics made from only recycled materials.

Polestar's four incoming models will use increasing amounts of recycled materials in their construction.

While the brand was open about electrification not being a magic solution, its head of sustainability, Fredrika Klarén, issued a warning to those still clinging to ICE technology: “Within the next five years, we’re going to see big behavioural changes – part of this will be specific targets for selling fuel for countries committed to net-zero.

“We will get into a situation where consumers are starting to think, 'If I buy a new combustion vehicle now, I’m going to have trouble selling it.'”

Mr Ingenlath added: “A V8 is not a positive image anymore – a lot of modern manufacturers are hiding the exhaust instead of exposing them – I think that kind of shift [away from combustion tech] is happening in society already.”

While Polestar is set to share its platforms with Volvo and Geely vehicles, all of its vehicles will be purely electric. It plots a line-up of four vehicles by 2025, consisting of two SUVs, the Polestar 2 crossover, and the Polestar 5 flagship GT.

In a bold plan for a newcomer brand, it also projects 290,000 global sales by 2025, noting in an investor presentation that it is currently the only other electric-only brand capable of a global footprint and mainstream sales besides Tesla.