Polestar 2 EV loses Space race: But does anyone care?
This summer: Australia's fakest automotive brand, Polestar, is coming to a pretend new flagship dealership. This time, deep in the rectum of a Melbourne shopping Mecca. Here's why you probably won't care...
Pretending to help solve the world’s carbon emission and climate change problems is not going to actually achieve those goals. Right?
If you imagine in your imagination that you’re going to make ‘green’ cars that are going to help you expel less greenhouse-contributing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, thereby trapping all the excess heat from exhausting itself into space as a result of radiation from the sun, that’s the same result as just making cars as normal. Right?
There’s a very grown-up concept called ‘ontology’, which is the existence of something. Then there’s the knowledge we have of that ontological existence - which is called ‘epistemology’. The science of knowing something, factually.
As a species, it is an epistemological (known) fact that Earth’s climate is changing, and it poses an existential threat to your ontological existence. Thankfully, a fake Swedish car company has just the car you need to buy in order to help solve this problem, allegedly. Except, this is objectively not true.
This is why New car road test review videos suck >>
Perhaps you think I'm being unkind when I refer to Polestar as the most fake automotive brand, but let me put it to you like this and you can see for yourself.
What does ‘fake’ mean? It means not genuine, obviously. So the first thing I'd suggest, but you can make your own determination, is that Polestar is fake-Swedish: they're owned by Geely, in China, ultimately. If you go to Geely’s website, Geely is actually Zhejiang Holding Group, and you can go to zgh.com and have a look at ‘Our Brands’ and you will find Polestar.
Here’s the truth about Polestar’s depreciation & sneaky finance offer >>, by the way.
In my view, Polestar can put its head office in some frozen paddock out the back of Gothenburg if it wants, but if it is ultimately owned by a company owned by a Chinese billionaire named Li Shufu and the vehicles its sells are manufactured in China, how authentically Swedish is it? I'm pretty sure most of the Polestar 2s that you could ever sit in at a dealership or buy, have never been anywhere near Sweden.
Made in Chengdu and Luqiao, China equals not Swedish. And that’s not a criticism - not even satire - just a fact.
In fact, here’s a list of all the locations Polestar builds, designs and does whatever commercial business, including Belgium, North America and the UK. Hardly Swedish.
I'd further suggest that the one product they sell, the Polestar 2, is really just a fake Volvo XC40. Is it not just an XC40 that's had the styling makeover to make it look like a hatch? But when you walk up to it, you realise that's a big hatch. And isn't Volvo going electric anyway? So what's the point?
The next aspects of this façade is the fake dealership, which is called a ‘Space’, with a capital ‘S’. I further believe that they're peddling fake virtue - and they're pedalling it pretty hard.
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WHY POLESTAR’S SUSTAINABILITY CLAIMS MATTER
Let me put that ‘pedalling’ in context.
The Polestar 2’s 78 kilowatt-hour battery, which is fricken massive and especially heavy, it's also a massive drain on the Earth's resources just to put a rich person in it so he or she can be in gridlock going from his/her swanky home to their corner office in the city, every day. All while being an insufferably virtuous green twat, perhaps.
The reason I'm so critical of that is the fake XC40 of Polestar 2 is heavier than a fricken Hilux SR5 - by about 15 kilos.
If you buy a Polestar 2, according to Polestar’s own sustainability declaration here >>, you are effectively funding the emission of 25 tons of CO2. That's what it takes to rip the raw materials out of the ground, make one, then all the supply chain logistics to get it there, in the dealership with your black Amex out.
That is a hell of a way to start saving the planet.
Instead of racing to build the biggest, heaviest resource-intensive shitbox with the longest range possible, Polestar might try building the lightest, most cost-effective, lowest emission-intensive lifecycle vehicle they can.
Incidentally, according to Polestar, 53 per cent of that embodied CO2 is the aluminium, the steel and the electronics - nothing to do with the advanced powertrain - and 25 tonnes of CO2 is roughly the same as burning 10,000 litres of petrol. All of which is enough to drive some used Corolla 100,000 kilometres, and would take the average person about six or seven years in Australia to clock up.
Except this CO2 is not being emitted over six or seven years. Those emissions are a done deal. All that’s needed is the funds from your black Amex.
Now sure, credit to Polestar for trying to be transparent about how much filthy greenhouse emissions are embodied in the manufacturing of their cars. That’s a lot more than virtually every single other carmarker on Earth wants you to know.
But when you make PR like this, it just says hypocrisy:
If Polestar wants to be transparent, they would do themselves a favour by telling us how much they paid former NASA astronaut Karen Nyberg.
There is a climate crisis and buying a Polestar 2 is not how you solve it. This is what makes Polestar entirely fake, in my view. It's nauseating.
They've issued the following release and while it is pretty early to call it, particularly after shooting down the Hyundai’s Ioniq 6 efficiency claims - but this takes the hypocrisy cake:
As if you thought a shopping mall couldn't get any worse, now we're putting a fake car dealership in one.
the award-winning space concept has been designed to supplement the brand's digital first retail model…
I think they mean the ‘buy now’ button on their online shop. Why don't they just call it what it is?
providing customers with an environment to connect with the brand…
They mean see the car, take a test drive. How innovative.
and experience the customer-centric approach of its team…
Okay, so in this Polestar ‘Space’ it sounds to me like a Genesis-type fake dealership in a shopping mall, trying to pretend like the don’t want to sell you the car, when in fact they’re selling the brand - they’re trying to sell you a mood, a lifestyle, a fantasy of living entirely virtuous with no independent critical thought or questioning for whether their cars are utterly pretentious.
meaning that there's room for customers to explore at their own pace…
Maybe this ‘Space’ doesn't have the ‘Killing Floor’ (the showroom), nor does it have the conventional ‘Ankle Grabbing Room’ (the sales manager’s office, not even a Ming Moll (that's not a net improvement - Ming Molls make the world go around).
“Won’t you join us, Mr Bond?” This is the notionally relaxed, better-paced consumer experience Polestar wants you do imagine is definitely rigged with trapdoors and tiny cameras watching your every move.
specialists, rather than sales people…
The verb is ‘man’. I'm sick of having to apologize for being a man (and men having ton apologise for being men), and this is not even a gender issue. It's a language issue. The verb is ‘to man’, as in to man the ramparts - even if you're a chick.
Even if this is a gender issue, and frankly I'm not seeing, it but if it is - if this is the front line of the battle for ‘inclusivity’ (which should really be called ‘inclusion’ because only one of those things is a word) then this battle for equality has long reached the appropriate time for a ceasefire.
meaning that there's room for customers to explore at their own pace…
Perhaps they're trying to suggest that you might be a bit ‘room temperature’ in the old IQ; that's a diplomatic way of letting you do that.
The CX-60 combines performance, batteries and SUV-luxury to beat Lexus, Mercedes and BMW while Mazda refuses to go fully electric in favour of big inline six-cylinder engines. If your family needs lots of legroom, a big boot, and grunt, the CX-60 needs to go on your shortlist.