Polestar’s online configurator no longer accepts traditional Polestar 2 orders, and Polestar says the reason is that demand is too high for its best-selling vehicle.
Polestar has been going through a rough patch lately. While the company’s sales grew by 6% in 2023, this is a slower expansion than most EV sectors. Notably, Polestar’s fourth-quarter figures were lower than those of the third quarter, despite the first deliveries of a new model, the Polestar 4, becoming a reality in the fourth quarter.
Even today, the company was dealt a major blow when Volvo severed its relationship with Polestar, which was originally a spin-off from Volvo. This leaves Polestar’s other partner, Geely, and of course Polestar herself, to blame for Polestar’s fate.
However, the Polestar 2 has just received a facelift and deliveries began last quarter. This typically drives sales of a diversity of cars and occasionally leads to a decline in recent quarters as consumers await the release of the new edition of the car. But between the third and fourth trimesters, that didn’t happen. Maybe Polestar wasn’t able to ramp up production of the refurbished edition fast enough, or maybe consumers just weren’t aware of the facelift, yet it’s common to see a drop in the quarter in which a facelift comes out.
So, you’d think things would look shaky for Polestar, but the company’s orders suggest otherwise.
In recent days, consumers have not been able to configure the new Polestar 2 cars of tradition in the United States. When attempting to do this, the Polestar configurator online page says:
Due to high demand, we are currently closed for new factory orders. Please explore our available cars to find the right one for you.
Then, you can click a button that says “check cars for fast delivery” to see if there are any cars in inventory that fit your order.
After checking a few other settings, it looks like there are several settings available, at least in Southern California, where I checked.
On the UK site, a slightly different error message appears. Some configurations will say “Configuration is not available for factory order. Please compare your configuration with available cars”, but other configurations show that “quick delivery must be obtained”. ” and provide a timeline once selected. In any case, there is no mention of the call across the Atlantic, the effect turns out to be more or less the same.
However, this is the first time this has happened with an electric vehicle. Many EVs end up getting a lot of pre-orders, to the point that corporations are putting off new orders until they can catch up. Tesla has done this several times in recent years. past, here’s an example from 2022.
We asked for further comment and were told by a Polestar representative that it was “temporary and not similar to suppliers, production or anything like that”. So there’s not a lot more detail here, but we do know that, currently, you can’t order a traditional Polestar. configuration and having to wait for the configurator to reopen or search for an original vehicle.
This story is interesting given the constant (and incorrect) media narrative lately that “EV demand is down” – a phrase that was used even in another article we saw covering this very story about demand supposedly being too high for Polestar to fulfill.
It turns out that there is no demand.
They have so much inventory that they have to prevent production until a portion of it is sold out.
They just dropped the price significantly for a reason…
In other words, this narrative is false. Demand for electric cars rarely decreases much, but increases, as do EV sales. To locate a hint of a slowdown in EV growth, you need to take a look at the current derivative of an EV sales chart. It’s more accurate to say that the percentage increase in EV sales is smaller today than in the past, but this is the natural result of increasing the base number: one hundred -> 1,000 is a tenfold increase, but 1,000 – > 5,000 This is only a 5-fold increase, obviously it’s a much larger increase in gross volume.
Meanwhile, sales of gasoline cars are declining, and yet this narrative is widely spread. It appears that gas vehicle sales peaked in 2017 and will likely never return to that level, while electric vehicle sales continue to rise.
However, some individual brands would possibly experience difficulties (e. g. , availability of a tax credit, upcoming NACS support not yet implemented, supply disruptions, etc. ). And Polestar is one of the brands that has developed more slowly than others lately. especially when it’s smaller in terms of deliveries and therefore deserves to have less difficulty generating a higher expansion percentage than a larger company (see the small/large number comparison above).
That’s what it’s like to see this notice on Polestar’s website, given the company’s more modest recent growth. We’d like to get a little more insight into what kind of numbers we’re dealing with here, but in the absence of that, it looks like buyers will just have to do some research for now to find a car close to the one they’re looking for.
Jameson has been driving electric vehicles since 2009, and has been writing about them and about clean energy for electrek.co since 2016.
You can contact him at jamie@electrek. co