Inevitably the plot thickens as my relationship with ‘The EV’ unfolds. On the one hand I remain a huge fan of ‘my’ Performance Pack Polestar 2. After 3500 miles I’m still smitten by it on many levels. As a daily driver I think it’s a superb car, one that contains a huge surprise-and-delight factor to almost everything it does on the move. More on which in a bit.
Because on the other hand there’s clearly trouble at the mill within Polestar, the company, the true repercussions of which are yet to be felt at ground level. The jury is still out on this aspect, unlike Polestar’s founding boss, Thomas Ingenlath, who recently walked away from his job exasperated, one suspects, by the global slow-down of the EV market on which his beloved brand had bet the farm.
The reins at Polestar have subsequently been handed to former Volkswagen USA and GM-Opel Europe boss, Michael Lohscheller, whose task is nothing if not simple: he needs to make the bottom line look a whole lot less awful than it does at the moment. His deadline is hard and comes at the end of 2026, by which time the American banks that loaned Polestar the $1bn it needed to stay in the game at the beginning of this year will want to see a major uptick in results. Otherwise who knows what fate awaits Polestar? Bear in mind this is a company that reported a global sales drop of 40 per cent at the end August, hence the departure of its founding father.
