Polestar Flying Solo as it Moves Toward Electrified Cars

Polestar and Volvo have been in cahoots since 1996, but the Scandinavian automaker officially bought out the company in July 2015. Now, Volvo is taking the Polestar brand in a whole new direction.

Today, Volvo has announced Polestar will become its own standalone brand separate from the Volvo brand. With this separation will come a whole new focus for Polestar, as it will move to creating performance electrified vehicles. Volvo didn’t get into whether this means hybrid, EV, or a mix of both.

What’s more, much like the Hyundai’s Genesis luxury brand, the Polestar brand will be void of any Volvo logos.

As for the brand’s famous performance enhancements for various Volvo models, this will continue under the Polestar Engineered brand.

Volvo will still work very closely with Polestar allowing the new brand to piggyback on its parent company’s technology and know-how. This will help it build what Volvo is calling “world beating electrified high performance cars.”

Also changing at Polestar is its management, as Thomas Ingenlath, senior vice president design at Volvo, will take the chief executive officer role and Jonathan Goodman, senior vice president corporate communication at Volvo Cars, will take on the chief operating officer role.

There is no mention of when Polestar will shift to building high-performance electrified vehicles, but I suspect it’ll be a few years before things really get rolling.

Stay tuned for updates.