Polestar Wants To Build A Truly Climate-Neutral Car

Swedish EV manufacturer Polestar has announced new partners in its quest to build a truly climate-neutral car by 2030. The idea behind the project involves finding ways to produce minerals, metals, chemicals and plastics without creating greenhouse gases or relying on carbon offsetting.

According to the UN's Environment Program "the transport sector is the fastest-growing greenhouse gas emitting sector" and will contribute as much as 30% of GHGs in the future.

New Partners
Twelve new partners have been announced, joining the project with focuses on different materials and processes within automotive production. Areas covered include sustainable rare earth material mining, paper fibers, biochemicals, fasteners, polymer compounds, bumper and trim plastics plus steel engineered 100% carbon-neutrally from up to 97% recycled materials. Sweden's Mistra Carbon Exit researches how buildings, infrastructure, transport and processes can be changed to produce fewer, if any, carbon emissions while other partners focus on making sustainable electrical cables and wiring harnesses.

“Our new partners will help develop solutions that don’t currently exist and they embrace the challenge of finding new technologies. The next five years will be critical, and we need partners that will engage with the Polestar 0 project to ensure its success. We will also see spin-off effects across various industries when we address the challenges in the automotive sector with innovation and the development of climate-neutral supply chains throughout a wide array of base industries.” - Hans Pehrson, leader of the Polestar 0 project and former Head of R&D at Polestar

Existing partners include firms dealing with fossil-free steel, zero-carbon aluminum and safety systems with ZF, of transmission fame, onboard to work on electric powertrain and overall systems.

“The real potential of electric cars will be fulfilled when we as an industry can say goodbye not just to tailpipe emissions, but production-related emissions as well. We made a bold commitment 18 months ago when we launched the Polestar 0 project, and these strong partnerships show the steady progress towards our goal.” - Thomas Ingenlath, CEO of Polestar

Images by Polestar licensed by CC BY 2.0.

James Walker is an Automotive Journalist at Torque News focusing on Lucid Motors. If it's got wheels he's interested, and he's looking forward to seeing what kind of cars the EV revolution brings us. Whether it's fast, slow, new, or old, James wants to have a look around it and share it in print and on video, ideally with some twisty roads involved. You can connect with James on Twitter, Instagram, and LinkedIn.