No place for mainstream combustion cars after 2030, says Polestar

Electric vehicles are the best — or at least the quickest — way to prevent climate change, according to Polestar, which says car-makers focussing on anything other than EVs in the coming years have got it all wrong.

The revelation came at a media briefing in Sydney yesterday, when Polestar’s Head of Sustainability, Fredrika Klaren, said there is no place for ‘non-EVs’ on a large scale after 2030.

“From our standpoint, our climate strategy is based on the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change). It’s a top-down approach,” said Klaren.

“We’ve said that we need to be climate neutral by 2040 as a company and we need to halve emissions by 2030, and that’s not what we can do – that is what the climate scientists are telling us we need to do as companies.

“We only have seven years left until we hit 1.5 degrees global warming. That’s a fact if we continue on the route we’re heading into. So, anything after 2030, we’re not interested.

“Anyone, any company claiming they can fix this in 2040, 2050, it’s not interesting, because we’ve missed the goal by then.”

When questioned on Toyota’s view that electric cars aren’t the only way to reduce automotive emissions, Klaren said anything but an EV-only future would fail to address the climate challenge.

“It’s not possible. We cannot continue using fossil fuels,” she said.

Toyota has revealed its own ambitious plans for market leadership in the EV space even before the arrival of its first electric vehicle, the bZ4X, which is due Down Under later this year.

However, the Japanese car-making giant, which is yet to put an end-date on combustion vehicle production, has attracted criticism for its lagging approach to battery-electric technology and appears unlikely to sacrifice sales of its popular petrol-electric hybrid and diesel vehicles any time soon.

While Klaren admits EVs won’t necessarily be the ‘saviour’, she says hybrid technology alone still isn’t good enough.

“To me, you’re still putting gasoline in the car, so don’t focus on that technology at all. If you keep focussing [and] having that in your business plan, you’re not going to level up in the way you need to do in terms of this new technology,” she said.

“I think that leaders are having to walk a very difficult walk, unfortunately. There are so many interests in this, so leaders have to be really bold now more than ever.

“All companies need to have that strategy to enable us to combat climate change in time. So that’s our predicament here. We know this. We know there is no place for non-EVs on a large scale after 2030 in that scenario.

“But OEMs are locked into their business plans. They plan for a transition and I understand that. But the thing is that the timeline is wrong and it’s not in line with scientists, so what we need to do is tear up those business plans and make new ones.”

The Chinese-owned EV brand, which arrived Down Under in late 2021 with the Polestar 2 electric fastback and is set to launch another three new EVs within three years, says transparency around total vehicle emissions is key to widespread EV adoption.

Both Polestar and its sister brand Volvo continue to publish annual Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) reports that detail the overall carbon footprint of their vehicles, including CO2 emissions produced during manufacturing.

A previous LCA report by Volvo listed 146,000km – which equates to almost 10 years at an average of 15,000km a year – as the break-even point at which a Volvo EV’s ‘CO2e’ footprint became smaller than an equivalent combustion vehicle’s, based on a global averaged electricity mix (GAEM).

“We started off being very transparent from the get-go and we had that luxury as a new company,” said Klaren.

“It’s so dangerous for the industry if it only keeps talking about electric vehicles as the saviour – we’re going to come into new ‘dieselgates’.

“Let’s instead be radically transparent and disclose the impact of these products, while at the same time being really clear that they’re a better alternative now.”