Polestar's in deep trouble: here's how the new boss wants to turn it around

Much as we like the look of Polestar cars and enjoy driving them, the company has been a bit of a commercial flop in its six years of carmaking. The new CEO, Michael Löhscheller, has been outlining his plans to change that. The most striking is to boost sales by launching a new compact crossover, to be called the 7. After all, these are the biggest selling cars in Europe. He says it will stick to Polestar's main propositions of being sporty and sustainable.

Polestar has lost money every year since it launched in 2018, and burned the fingers of investors including Volvo, which offloaded much of its share to their common parent company Geely. Change is needed urgently then.

Löhscheller explains the 7 will be developed in Europe and built on this continent, mostly for a European audience. He says it will be sized between the Volvo EX30 and XC40. It will use a new platform being developed by the Geely Group. "Then the Polestar team will do the steering, suspension, interface, and give it the Polestar DNA."

He says the platform will come with all the latest technology: fast charging, big range, 800V electrics, and full over-the-air updates. That means OTA updates of the whole car, not just of the infotainment system which is common among European brands.

The 7 will be shaped by Polestar's head of design Philipp Römers, who arrived in August 2024 to replace Maximilian Missoni who has gone to BMW to lead the design of the upper-series cars there. How will Römers change the look of Polestar?

"The brief I gave Philipp is to highlight the performance, and show it in a confident way," says Löhscheller. "Polestar is a bit too modest at the moment. US and Chinese buyers don't want too much understatement. But don't expect a radical change. It's a fine line."

Löhscheller personally likes the minimalism, mind. I ask him what is his favourite design and he says the Polestar 2, saying it is "timeless". (Indeed: it was first shown as a Volvo 40.2 concept eight years ago.)

The timings for Polestar's new cars have been shaken up, so they won't launch in the sequence of their names, which was the strategy so far. After 2024's 3 and 4, the 5 comes this year. But the 7 will launch before the 6. His rationale is that the 6, as a sporty electric roadster, is a car to sell in small numbers and a distraction from the huge commercial importance of the 7. That said, he won't commit to a date for the 7.

He's hugely excited about the Polestar 5. It's a full-on Taycan-rivalling flagship, topping out at 900bhp, riding on a new bonded aluminium platform. The price will climb beyond five figures. It's being developed at Polestar's engineering centre near Coventry, but will be built in China. The 3 by the way will be built at a Volvo factory in the US so avoids potential tariffs there and in the EU, while the ones sold in the UK are from China.

After the 7 and 6 launch, it will be time for a new 2 – which Löhscheller says will be called 2, not 8, by the way. It will use the same platform as the 7, his logic being there's room for both in the range because some buyers want a low-slung car and some a crossover.

Gradually he wants all Polestar cars except the 6 and 7 to move onto this platform to save cost and business complication, but given the 3 and 4 are so new, he admits that'll be many years away.

But that's all in the distant future and if the company's sales can't be sorted then it's a future that won't arrive. Polestar, a relative newcomer, has widespread brand recognition and gets a lot of affection. But Löhscheller says it was making its cars too hard to buy. They sat in white boxes in shopping centres. People had to come a long way to see them and then go home and buy online.

"We will go from displaying cars to actively selling them." That means establishing more conventional dealers. "Buying a car is complicated and emotional. People need to have it explained." Most of these new dealers will be alongside the Volvo dealers that already do all Polestar's servicing. He says Volvo and Polestar's brand positions are far apart that people won't cross-shop.