Polestar, the Sino-Sweden electric car maker based in Sweden and owned by China’s Geely plans to build its Precept electric sedan in China at a new factory, its CEO said on Saturday.
CEO Thomas Ingenlath made the announcement at the Beijing International Automotive Exhibition 2020.
The car will be manufacture in China, the world’s biggest auto market.
The car maker’s Polestar 2 sedan is already in production in China and available in China, Europe and the United States. Polestar is looking to expand its market in the Asia Pacific region and the Middle East too.
The four-door EV Percept Grand Tourer concept car was unveiled earlier this year as a showcase sports brands for Volvo. It used some innovative designs and sustainable material. These include flax-based composites that cut weight by up to 50%. The Precept’s interior also uses materials such as recycled PET bottles, reclaimed fishing nets and recycled cork vinyl.
The Percept is touted as a design inspiration for a future Polestar 3 SUV and even for a Tesla Model 3 saloon.
The company said that the final car will be as close in design to the concept car as possible That includes a commitment to use as many sustainable materials as possible to minimize its use of plastic and reduce its carbon footprint.
“Once we did the Precept and stood in front looking at it… my god. Sometimes you just do something and you’re really tempted,” said Ingenlath.
“After we revealed the Precept, we read the articles on it and had people seeing it, and we got the conviction that the design was something people liked and that it could be a real hit. “The question is always ‘how do you make it work’? What will it take technology-wise and investment-wise?
“This isn’t fake: it was built as a show car, but our engineers have done the research and found ways to construct it and do it. It’s an ambitious project, but we wanted to make it our next big project.”
The Percept will take at least three years to reach the market. There is a lot of infrastructures and design-build work involved due to the sustainable material to be used in the car and the assembly line has to be readied to ensure the new materials it uses and its design features can be produced at volume.
Ingenlath said that the car will follow Polestar’s number-based nomenclature.
There are very few under-the-hood technical details available about the Polestar. Ingenlath hinted it would have a “competitive” range and would be at par with the other sports brand in the market.
The Precept concept is 3.1 meters in length, about 150mm longer than a Model S, to allow room for a larger battery.
It carries the latest version of Polestar’s Android-based infotainment system, with a 15-inch portrait-orientated central touchscreen and a 12.5in digital instrument display.
Percept will not be a limited run edition. Ingenlath explained, “Mass production with 30 or 60 cars per hour is also not the idea. There are cars and volumes in between. You can’t produce just hundreds of such cars, but you don’t need to produce 10,000 to make it production-relevant.”
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