Thomas Ingenlath is probably having too much fun in his Polestar 3. He zips through stoplights, careens around tight turns and smiles like a man much younger than his 59 years.
“This car can really be pushed,” said the Polestar CEO on a drive around Spanish Bay, north of Pebble Beach, during Monterey Car Week. Throughout the drive, he praised the SUV for its comfortable, smooth yet engaging handling that buyers of the brand’s first two vehicles, the hybrid Polestar 1 and the electric Polestar 2, have come to know and love.
Dressed in a neutral-colored suit, he almost blends into the pale interior of the full-size SUV, the only contrast being the yellow seatbelt across his chest. It’s an aesthetic that matches the attitude of the car itself: luxurious and minimalist, with the sharp performance typical of Polestar machines.
Safe EV foundation, shifting political sands
But the Polestar 3 marks a new path for the brand on American streets. While the car Ingenlath is powering through Monterey traffic was built in China, the first American-assembled Polestar 3 SUV is just rolling off the line at the Polestar factory in Ridgeville, South Carolina.
The same plant has long produced cars for Volvo, which is owned by China’s Geely Holding. Polestar, a Volvo spin-off based in Sweden and owned by Geely, is now sharing the space as it grows rapidly in the U.S. amid a backlash from recent tariffs on Chinese EVs.
In fact, the company's Polestar 2 is built in Gothenburg, while all Polestar 3 SUVs for the U.S. market are built in South Carolina.
“I think Polestar 3 production is on a safe footing,” Ingenlath said.
It may be safe ground, but the sands are undoubtedly shifting. Ingenlath sees the EV market’s demand evolving and will require patience. “How fast will it evolve? We’ll have to wait and see,” he says. “But it’s certainly not something that concerns us about our company’s purpose.”
Ingenlath says he would like to see higher adoption rates here, but he would be happier if American politics were “a little more consistent.”
He is watching the election closely. “All the noise around here is just unsettling,” he muses. “When you build a premium car brand, you need consistency. You need consistency in model politics, in pricing, and of course we want to have a much more stable basis for decision-making. And you know, you can’t react every week, every month. It takes years to make meaningful economic decisions.”
Cars like the Polestar 3 take more than five years to design and develop. Moves like the new tariffs on Chinese EVs imported into the US have emerged overnight and are a real threat.
EV Financing
That’s just one of the challenges Polestar has faced recently. In early 2024, Volvo sold off a significant portion of its stake in the company. Ingenlath downplays that, noting that Volvo still owns about 18 percent of the company. “It doesn’t matter,” he says. “If you own 20 percent of a company, you have a lot of interest in what’s going on.”
Polestar got its business back on track with a $1 billion loan. Ingenlath says the change in ownership has not led to any changes in how the business is run. Still, he says it's always good to focus on the basics.
“Now, on the obligation to the banks, it's important to show that we're launching a great car, that we're successfully launching it on the market, delivering it and selling it,” Ingenlath said.
Ingenlath declined to say whether Polestar would need more funding to execute its plans, but said his current focus was on making Polestar “self-sufficient.”
Betting on SUVs
The Polestar 3 is essential to that plan. The Polestar 2 is a nice-driving, clean-looking sedan, but it plays in a market dominated by SUVs in the United States. Ingenlath calls it “a rather compact European sedan that doesn’t meet the needs of families.”
The Polestar 3 will be a better option for families who can afford its starting price of at least $73,400. It’s much larger, more upright, more spacious than the Polestar 2, and still promises to deliver the same driving characteristics.
The bottom line is that sales growth is needed to lay the groundwork for Polestar's next launch.
The repetitive naming convention continues with the Polestar 4, a compact SUV that trades some of the Polestar 4's bulk (and rearward visibility) for a dramatically flared roofline and a more affordable price (starting at $54,900).
Next up is the Polestar 5, a sporty and stylish sedan that fits the brand’s design-centric focus. Ingenlath says this attribute is more important to the business than federal EV subsidies. “We have to get people to sit in the Polestar’s driver’s seat and buy our product because they’re really attracted to it and they want it,” he says.
The Polestar 4 is due out later this year, while the Polestar 5 is slated for 2025 — an aggressive schedule considering the Polestar 2 was the company’s only product in the U.S. for nearly four years.
That wasn’t the plan. The Polestar 3 suffered significant delays due to software issues, which also sidelined its corporate sibling, the Volvo EX90. Still, Ingenlath says technology sharing with Volvo is key to Polestar’s ability to iterate quickly.
“Why should we develop our own ADAS systems?” he asks. “Of course, Volvo provides the right technology base for the premium cars we want to build.”
Despite the partial sale of Volvo, the technology sharing will continue. Volvo is not the only partner. Polestar was an early adopter of Android Automotive, handing over virtually all of its in-car interfaces to Google.
“It's one of the most brilliant, slick success stories of actually implementing technology,” he says, and was met with skepticism at first. “People were like, 'Oh, what are you doing? Are you really going to get in bed with Google? What, what, what?' A lot of people were frowning. Oh my, our customers love it. It's a huge step forward in terms of usability.”
The real step forward for Polestar will be the launch of the long-awaited Polestar 3, which Ingenlath now says should be out in “a matter of weeks.”
