Until now, Polestar has been known primarily for building race cars and for tuning Volvos for better performance and handling, but that is all about to change.
Less than two years after Volvo bought Polestar outright and put it in charge of doing to its cars what AMG has been doing to Mercedes for 50 years, the company is set to relaunch as a standalone brand, dedicated to creating performance-focused electric cars.
Volvo is so serious about the new venture that it's putting its senior vice president of design, Thomas Ingenlath, in the driver's seat.
"Thomas heading up the Polestar organization shows our commitment to establishing a truly differentiated stand-alone brand within the Volvo Car Group," said Håkan Samuelsson, president and chief executive of Volvo Cars.
Polestar has been winning races on the track for over 50 years and has had a close working relationship with Volvo since 1966, converting its vehicles into competition cars for various races and racing series. For the past five years, it has been dedicating its time away from the track to building hot Volvos. Indeed, at the beginning of June the firm celebrated building its 100,000th Polestar Volvo and announced that much more was to come.
This doesn't mean that Volvo will stop offering sportier, tuned versions of its luxury cars -- it is a necessity if it wants to continue to compete with BMW and Mercedes. Therefore, highly tuned XC90s and XC60s will continue to roll off the production line but carrying a new "Polestar Engineered" designation.
"Polestar will be a credible competitor in the emerging global market for high performance electrified cars," Samuelsson said. "With Polestar, we are able to offer electrified cars to the world's most demanding, progressive drivers in all market segments."
As for what these cars will be like, Ingenlath claims that they will be "bespoke" and that each car will be sold under the newly created Polestar brand and badge, rather than use Volvo's name.
"The next chapter in Polestar's history is just beginning," said Ingenlath.
