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Polestar Has a Bold Plan—Get Better at Selling Cars

The China-controled EV brand has been losing tens of thousands of dollars on every car sold. With a US ban on Chinese car sales looming, the company needs to quickly turn things around.

“It’s an unusual conflict of interest to see the CEO of Tesla in any way involved with EV policy for the entire country,” said Peter Wells, a business professor and director of the Centre for Automotive Industry Research at Cardiff University in Wales, UK. The company has done a good job setting up the direct-to-consumer baseline, now the key task is making sure that the active selling through retail partners is improving.” More showrooms, then, and less reliance on online sales—old-school thinking. Lochscheller, Wells says, is instilling in Polestar a “sense of conservatism, an attempt to cut costs, drive up volumes, adopt a more traditional marketing strategy, and generate enough revenue to survive.”

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