‘Makes the product less valuable’
When it took office, the Polestar 2 was the prime competitor for the Tesla Model 3. However, after several price reductions by Tesla, its starting price is thousands of euros above that of the Model 3, and Polestar has no plans to do anything about it. Not even if more Polestar models arrive in the near future.
€7,207. That is the price difference between a Polestar 2 Standard Range Single Motor and the basic version of the Tesla Model 3, cars that are very comparable in other areas. The price difference increases even further for the Long Range versions. This is of course mainly due to Tesla, which has lowered prices considerably over time.
However, according to Polestar CEO Tomas Ingenlath, nothing will change in this area for the time being. “If you lower prices, you actually make such a car less valuable,” he told Automotive News. “Look what we did with the update to the Polestar 2. We made it better and also a little more expensive. We could also have done exactly the opposite by installing a cheaper battery, using a simpler drivetrain and cheaper materials, and then keeping the price the same. Or we could have followed Tesla and installed just one screen, saving a lot of money, because that extra screen is expensive for the driver. But we didn’t do that.”
It may be just us, but we still sense some resentment in this story. Not incomprehensible, by the way, because the Polestar boss has undoubtedly been asked about Tesla’s prices before. Tesla indeed has a knack for removing hardware items such as radars and parking sensors where possible in order to reduce costs. However, with the recent facelift, the Model 3 also improved ‘hardware’.
According to Ingenlath, the added value of Polestar is that there is passion behind the products. “Customers immediately notice if you only make cars to make money. There are always cheaper alternatives, whether it concerns bicycles, telephones or cars, but there are also always people who appreciate brands with passion, who want to push boundaries.”
According to our data, Tesla has sold around 44,000 Model 3s in the Netherlands so far, while roughly 8,700 Polestars 2 were registered in more or less the same period.
Polestar 3 and 4
Four years after the introduction of the Polestar 2, a second volume model has still not been added to the range of Geely subsidiary Polestar. That should change in the near future, because the large Polestar 3 and the smaller Polestar 4 have already been announced. According to the same interview, the latter will take a little longer than previously stated: the rear windowless Polestar 4 would not arrive in Europe at the beginning, but only halfway through 2024.
– Thanks for information from Autoweek.nl