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SWEDEN’S pure electric vehicle manufacturer, Polestar, will enter the Australian market in November as the nation’s first dedicated online sales brand supported by city-based information-only stores known as “spaces”.

Revealed this week, the Polestar 2 will only be sold online but Polestar Spaces will be established in major centres as information and test-drive locations staffed by non-sales people.

The arrangement is similar to Tesla that doesn’t use a sales showroom but has service centres that, in Polestar’s case, will be Volvo workshops.

No pricing or specifications are available as yet but the liftback sedan will be available with three drivetrain options, however GoAutoNews Premium believes it will be similar on price to its main rival, the Tesla Model 3, pointing to a price bracket of around $70,000-$100,000, depending on the variant.

Further down the track the brand will expand to offer a subscription service – in its primary right-hand drive market, the UK, lease and subscription are the primary methods of ownership.

Subscription will cover all aspects of car ownership and maintenance – except charging – and allow owners to swap the car after a specified time.

Based on the experience in the UK market, the online process to buy a Polestar can take less than one hour, including finance approval. The brand is geared to provide its own finance to accelerate the purchase.

Polestar announced in March that Australia and New Zealand were two of five new markets to be opened in the Asia Pacific region, joining Singapore, Hong Kong and South Korea.

It said that in Australia and South Korea, the operations would be run by independent Polestar units with the local division headed by former Volvo executive Samantha Johnson.

In conjunction with the online-only plan, Polestar announced it has completed a life-cycle assessment of the new vehicle and is partnering with blockchain provider Circulor to trace ethical use of manufacturing materials.

The assessment was compared against the outgoing petrol-fuelled XC40 with which it shares its platform.

It covered a vehicle life period of 200,000km and showed that from raw materials to the 200,000km life, the XC40 produced 58 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

Over the same distance and life, the Polestar 2 produces 50 tonnes C02 equivalent using a global electricity mix (averaging what fuel produces power in each market) while the low carbon-producing electricity of Europe returned a 42 tonnes CO2 equivalent and electricity from wind power alone used 15 tonnes of CO2 equivalent.

Polestar said in its report that such assessments are becoming increasingly common in use by car manufacturers.

Its partnership with Circulor already traces the origins of cobalt – a key material in the manufacture of lithium-ion batteries – to ensure a sustainable and ethical mining source, and now extends to other materials in the car-making process.

These include a range of raw materials with a focus on those with identified risks in either environmental and/or human rights, including nickel, mica, manganese, graphite and lithium.

The Polestar 2 will be followed in Australia by the Polestar 3, an electric SUV based on the Volvo XC90 platform.

The Polestar 1, a hybrid EV launched in 2019, was a limited-production, left-hand drive vehicle built of carbon-fibre that finished production this year.

By Neil Dowling

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