With Multiple Personalities, Polestar Plots Its Post-Volvo Course

Ads shifted back to performance, most pointedly in the “Naughty Volvo” TV ads from 2010, which featured Volvos in showy high-speed maneuvers with a keening guitar soundtrack.

That same year, Volvo tantalized car buffs with a C30 concept car developed in partnership with Polestar racing, a brutish 405-horsepower all-wheel-drive shooting brake in a bright blue color variously called Rebel Blue, Cyan or “Swedish Racing Green.” When Volvo said it would bring 250 limited-edition Polestar C30s to the States, it appeared Polestar’s AMG moment had arrived.

Car companies have sub-brands like AMG, STI and Abarth for good reason. High-performance cars can be finnicky and expensive to buy and maintain. The sub-branding keeps those irksome traits from tarring the image of the day-to-day vehicles. And it impresses automotive opinion makers with what a company can produce when let off the leash.

But in 2010, at the peak of the performance push, Ford, which had purchased Volvo in 1999, sold it to Zhejiang Geely Holding Group in China. It was the end of Polestar’s apparent AMG ambitions. When the Polestar C30 arrived in U.S. dealerships in 2013, it had a modest 10 percent more horsepower than the stock model.

And therein lay a lesson in image administration. Plans set in motion typically take five years to play out, both for manufacturing and marketing. Volvo’s message shift to performance left its monopoly on safety vulnerable. The less expensive Subaru mounted a challenge. A 2006 print ad for its Tribeca S.U.V. was headlined, “Airbags Save Lives. All-Wheel Drive Saves Airbags.” Safety-focused ads continue today. Richard Muir, an account director at Volvo’s ad agency from 2014 through 2016, recalled that “Subaru stole safety while Volvo was asleep at the wheel.”

Between the change in Volvo ownership and shifts in marketing, the Polestar brand became hazier.

When Geely bought the Polestar name from its racing partner (now Cyan Racing) in 2015, it repurposed Polestar as a new brand of electric cars and an innovation lab for Volvo.

Adding to the jumble, today Polestar calls itself an independent brand, although Volvo still offers a Polestar Engineered V60 T8 wagon, an electric hybrid.