Car Design Review X: Maximilian Missoni, Polestar

E=MC2 is considered one of the most elegant equations ever created. Not because it looks good, but because it condenses a very complex set of information in a way that is simple and elegant. That’s the point. It’s not about stripping away content but communicating in an elegant, pure way. It’s the same in design.

Let’s be honest, last year was challenging for Polestar, as we still only had one car on sale – the 2 – but simultaneously ramped up commercially for the upcoming cars. We launched two cars in the last 12 months, the 3 in October 2022 and the 4 in April 2023. Both will go on sale from the beginning of 2024 . We’ve also communicated two more cars in broad brush strokes – the Polestar 5 and 6 to follow soon after that.

Besides that, we managed to make quite a splash with collaborations last year. Our project with Swedish brand Candela is one example. It makes highly efficient electric hydrofoil boats where we recently worked on a joint model, with Polestar providing the batteries and charging system and creating a Polestar edition. We also had a fantastic result from our design contest through our massive, worldwide Polestar Design Community. The team and the winners designed and built the Synergy, a full-size super car for the IAA in Munich which was extremely well-received.

For me personally, it has been a challenging 12-18 months, because during that time we moved from Volvo to a temporary design studio and then into our current building in December 2022. The temporary studio was a great space down by the water in Gothenburg, but it didn’t have physical modelling facilities. It was stressful working on multiple cars in parallel, between those three locations. The place we’re in now is historic – it used to be Volvo’s headquarters in the 1980s and 90s. It’s beautiful, but also not intended to be a design studio, so we’ve altered it to be suitable for us. Ultimately, we will be moving into another building in a few years which will be purpose-built for Polestar design. Now, I’m just glad we’re in a great space that feels like home for the team.

At the same time, we’ve been growing. We now have about 70 permanent design staff, fluctuating up to 100 with external capacity. The work we’ve put into the brand and the image we have built up makes it fairly easy to recruit. We are still at that point when it comes to size, that it’s not always just talent that we go for, but people who have a lot of cognitive potential, we need people who make each other grow.

Those who can develop into the Polestar style and who also have strong individual characters, because that’s what I think needs to shine through in a car. That’s one of the process-changes we made at Volvo. Often there is a hand-over from the early-phase to the late-phase design team and in that process a lot of character gets lost. Having the same people fight for the last millimetre to the end, leads to a retention of character in the product.

We are in the premium segment with relatively few models. We’re not a boutique brand, but we’re not cookie-cutting 50 models per year either. So, we have the time and focus to keep the team together throughout the design development process.

We have different engineering partners at Volvo, Geely and Polestar who all have slightly different ways of working. During the pandemic, things changed, with people not travelling so much. We look at real prototypes for the final verification, but the process before that is extremely digital. We send data back and forth and meet online. The engineering teams are in Sweden, England and China and it works well.

One of the values in our UX team is to ‘surprise’, which is why I say I admire ‘playful but mature’ solutions. They shouldn’t be gimmicks. We’re not into that. But for example, on the Polestar 4, you can choose ambient lighting based on planetary colours. Instead of giving people a light slider where they can choose whatever colour they want from bright pink to light green, we offer natural colours from the solar system.

You click to open the app widget on the centre screen and all the different colours and planets appear, with beautiful renderings and information about their gravity, distance to earth, temperature and so on. That’s our way to create ambient light in the car. It has an educational, fun aspect. Instead of options we give you a concept, a playful theme that not only kids will enjoy.

We strive for the less obvious solutions and spend the extra time adding value, to be more intellectual. This is our experiment. We have 130,000 cars out there, but that’s still relatively small compared to other brands. So, we will see how far we can take it. It’s such an exciting time for us. We can shape what our brand and customers will be, and we don’t take that lightly.