Polestar exec outlines top challenges on path to net zero

PARIS -- Sustainability is the biggest challenge the automotive industry has ever faced, and the only way to meet the challenge of significantly lowering greenhouse gas emissions by 2030 is by acting together.

That was the key message delivered by Polestar executive Fredrika Klaren to the Automotive News Europe Congress here last week.

Klaren, who is the Swedish EV maker's head of sustainability, said the world is facing a climate "crisis" and the industry has "an impactful solution which can be scaled, but it is so far underutilized: electrification."

Polestar, which was co-founded in 2017 by Geely and Volvo, only builds full-electric cars.

Klaren said EVs are not 100 percent clean, but they are better than other powertrains. At the same time, she admitted that EV makers have several challenges to work on as they scale up production.

For Polestar the company's "moonshot" goal is of having a climate-neutral vehicle on the road by 2030.

"We are putting our engineers to the task," she said. "We have carbon budgets for all of our car programs that they need to figure out how to stay under."

Polestar is identifying where the emissions are in all steps from raw materials to the finished components in the car and then asking: "How do we eliminate them? No offsetting. How do we eliminate the emissions?"

Klaren said Polestar is finding a number of areas where it can achieve success. In the Polestar 3 and Polestar 4 SUVs the company is using a bio-attributed vinyl that replaces crude oil with pine oil in its construction. She said Polestar is also seeking ways to get to net zero in steel production.

Klaren said Polestar can't put a figure on how much it will cost the company to achieve its sustainability target, but it's not alone.

"Sustainability professionals are asked to deliver clear plans and clear budgets for this," she said. "But there is so much that we don't know and we have to put our resources into figuring it out while being brave enough to set targets and communicate them."

To reach full sustainability the entire supply chain will need to comply, which won't be easy because, she said, "there is a huge gap in terms of reliable data" to measure how sustainable a company is.

This gap is even worse than in the industry she worked in before coming to Polestar, which was fashion.

"I thought that we had problems in the fashion industry," she said. "But when I joined the automotive industry, I saw an industry that knew even less about its supply chain. [Automakers] know their Tier 1s and that is basically it."

Klaren said the solution is to tackle the problem together, which means that all companies should ask for the same kind of data and set up the same traceability plans to be sure the data is coming from where it should to help fight corruption in the supply chain.

"We are working with the most notoriously corrupt industry in the world -- the metals and mining industry," she said. "We have to face this head on as an industry if we are ever to rely on our data."

Klaren also took aim at automotive rivals.

"It's hard for car companies to put climate on top of their agenda," she said, referring to the reluctance of rivals to join Polestar in publishing life cycle assessments and carbon footprints of their products.

Asked whether sustainability can be profitable, Klaren said she wanted to turn the question around: "How can a company ever expect to be profitable going forward without sustainability at the core of their offer, their business and their brand?"