Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath
Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath in the guest article for the current issue of the eMove360 ° magazine.
Electric cars are not green per se. As the CEO of an electric car company, I shouldn’t be saying that. I should use phrases like “holistic sustainable mobility”, but we cannot be satisfied with pretty empty phrases on our way to a cleaner planet. To avoid misunderstandings: electric cars are the future. Electric cars pave the way to climate-neutral mobility, but we have to stop greenwashing and talk openly about change. A change that has to take place.
We need companies that are courageous, innovative and develop solutions that are up to the huge challenges we are facing! Not only will these companies lead the way in this new era we live in, but they will thrive too. Only when we recognize this and work towards it can we position our companies and our planet for the future.
Transparency is the key factor for sustainable change. That’s why we publish life cycle assessments for all of our vehicles, starting with the Polestar 2. These analyzes take into account a number of factors in a car’s life cycle, from procurement to manufacturing to recycling, and summarize the climate impacts in an easy-to-understand figure .
We call on the automotive industry to create transparency in the reporting of the CO₂ footprint, in an ethical supply chain and in the traceability of materials. We cannot go on as before and we have to increase the speed with which we pursue the goal of sustainable mobility. Long-term goals of 2040 and 2050 are not enough; we have to drastically reduce emissions by this decade. That is why we have set ourselves an ambitious goal, a so-called “Moonshot project”: inspiring that challenges the whole team. A project that requires rethinking, innovation, passion and creative ideas: a truly climate-neutral car by 2030. A car that will leave the factory gate with zero CO₂e emissions. Really climate neutral means that we do not rely on offsetting, but instead concentrate on eliminating emissions. That means we need to change the way we make cars today.
Transparency will make all the difference this way. Many companies communicate goals, but do not show any progress. We wanted to change that, which is why we published our product sustainability declaration for the first time, which lists the carbon footprint of our models and the traceable risk minerals. This enables our customers to follow our progress on the way to climate neutrality. Here we need to honestly communicate obstacles, as well as real improvements.
We are already showing the CO₂e footprint and the traceable risk materials of all three variants of the Polestar 2, so that it is easy and intuitive for consumers to understand the climate impacts of the various variants. Likewise, price or range should be included in the purchase decision. This type of declaration is widely used in industries such as food and fashion. We introduced them to the automotive industry. If this were to catch on in our industry, the impact would be enormous.
Polestar Project Zero is the greatest challenge we can face. With each step towards zero, it will become more difficult to master the next. Do we already know how to actually achieve it? Certainly not! But if we don’t focus all of our efforts on that one overarching goal, we’ll never find out. Let’s not waste another minute.
#Transparency #Polestar #climateneutrality
