Volvo News: Polestar Not Getting Volvo's Speed Limit

[Drew Dowdell]

Volvo caused a stir on Monday when it announced that it would begin setting a 112-mph top speed on all of its vehicles starting with the 2020 model year. The goal of the limit is to strive toward Volvo's Vision 2020 Plan to eliminate fatalities or serious injury in all Volvo new vehicles.

That release made no mention of Volvo's Polestar brand. CNET Roadshow interviewed Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath who said "We obviously will not do that, and it is a nice brand differentiator".  Polestar is considered a performance brand, but he thinks that talking maximum speed is missing the point with regard electric cars. Most of the focus on EVs tends to be around the 0-60 performance rather than max speed. 

As Polestar is still a Volvo at heart, it will benefit from Volvo's safety know-how, but it won't pursue a safety image like Volvo has.

Polestar unveiled the Polestar 2 electric car at the Geneva Auto Show this week.  Read more below.

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[David]

I totally can agree with this that Volvo is the safety brand and Polestar is the performance brand. Cool.

[smk4565]

So "saving lives" only matters on gas powered cars and not EV's?  I think Volvo probably did some study that their buyers don't really care about performance anyway, and buy capping speed at 112 mph they can save some money by not having to fit cars with Z or W rated tires and they could save about $40 per car.

But Polestar can't compete with Tesla and the Germans with a bunch of nanny devices restricting performance, thus to have any chance to sell Polestars they have to push the performance of them. 

This is basically like GM saying all cars except Corvette, Camaro and V-series Cadillacs will have speed limited to 112 mph because of safety.  But the Corvette can can go 200 mph because safety doesn't matter on performance cars.  You can't pick and choose.

[Drew Dowdell]

6 minutes ago, smk4565 said:

So "saving lives" only matters on gas powered cars and not EV's?  I think Volvo probably did some study that their buyers don't really care about performance anyway, and buy capping speed at 112 mph they can save some money by not having to fit cars with Z or W rated tires and they could save about $40 per car.

But Polestar can't compete with Tesla and the Germans with a bunch of nanny devices restricting performance, thus to have any chance to sell Polestars they have to push the performance of them. 

This is basically like GM saying all cars except Corvette, Camaro and V-series Cadillacs will have speed limited to 112 mph because of safety.  But the Corvette can can go 200 mph because safety doesn't matter on performance cars.  You can't pick and choose.

Polestar sells gasoline powered cars too under the Volvo brand.

[smk4565]

4 minutes ago, Drew Dowdell said:

Polestar sells gasoline powered cars too under the Volvo brand.

So will a Volvo Polestar model not have a speed limiter, but a regular S60 or XC90 have a limiter?  That is total hypocrisy .

[Drew Dowdell]

I don't know

[Guest Der FunkleUnkle]

So as it turns out, Volvo isn’t really that overly concerned about “safety”.