Polestar is happy to have polarising features on its cars as a way of standing out against the competition.
These include the likes of the lack of rear window on the Polestar 4, which instead has a camera to give the driver a digital rear view.
At the recent Munich motor show, CEO Michael Lohscheller told Autocar: “80% of the customers get used to very quickly and then they like it – but I will say there are also people who don’t like it.
“So in a way, the car is polarising, which sometimes is really, really good, because you don’t want a car that is ‘kind of all right’.
“Everybody has a ‘kind of all right’ car, but you want a very specific car. That’s what the Polestar 4 is doing: there are people who drive it and love it, then there are 20% who say ‘it’s absolutely not for me’.
“But that’s okay; it’s totally okay. We don’t want a car where everybody says, ‘well, I kind of like it’. No, you have to love it or not.
“So I think actually [the 4] is an exceptionally successful [design].”
Lohscheller said the new Polestar 5 continued the trend for the Swedish brand of “making a statement” in its positioning and execution.
It also continued a trend for Polestar in being based on a different platform to other models in the range, meaning all five Polestars to date have been built on different underpinnings.
Lohscheller said that trend would change and the brand “would harmonise over time” and launch more related models.
The European-built Polestar 7 smaller SUV and next-generation Polestar 2 are likely to be the first to share a platform.
“The more you standardise, the better your quality,” Lohscheller added.
More broadly on European production, Lohscheller said it will reduce Polestar’s CO2 footprint by bringing local production to its largest market. It will also allow it to get its cars to customers quicker in the UK, its biggest single market.
He remains committed to the brand’s ‘asset-light’ business model, which means sourcing platforms, technology and factories in which to build cars from other companies.
This will be “the future of the automotive industry”, according to Lohscheller, in order for car companies to be more efficient and leverage more from each other.