On August 10, Polestar Motors announced that Feng Dan will take over as Nathan Forshaw as President of Polestar China from August 15.
According to the data, Nathan Fochau has held senior management positions in many multinational companies such as Jaguar Land Rover and Volvo Group, joined Polestar Automobile in 2016, and was appointed as the Chief Operating Officer of Polestar China and the head of APEC of Polestar Asia Pacific in November 2020, responsible for the operation management and market expansion of Polestar China, and will be responsible for the team building and business development of Polestar Asia Pacific as the head of Polarstar Asia Pacific.
Regarding Feng Dan's joining, Polestar CEO Thomas Inglatt said: "We sincerely welcome Mr. Fontaine to join Polestar. Mr. Feng Dan has a deep insight into the automotive industry and has successful experience in brand growth, and he will lead PoleStar China into a new stage of development. It is understood that before joining PoleStar, Feng Dan had eight years of work history at SAIC-GM, serving as the director of the Marketing Department of the Cadillac brand.
In recent years, the personnel of Polestar Automobile In China has changed frequently. It is understood that Shen Feng is the first CEO of PoleStar China, with more than 30 years of automotive work experience, first joined ford motor companies in the United States in 1999, after Geely acquired the endangered Volvo Cars from Ford, Shen Feng joined the trend to create Volvo China Auto R&D China, and served as the vice president of R&D of Volvo Car Group Asia Pacific and the president of Volvo Cars China R&D Company. In 2016, Volvo and Geely established the Polestar independent brand, and Shen Feng served as polestar's global CTO and postar China CEO, the first CEO of Polestar China, but soon left. In December 2017, WEINA announced that Shen Feng, former global CTO of Polestar and CEO of China, has joined NIO as vice president of NIO quality and chairman of the quality management committee, responsible for its overall quality-related management work, and reported to Li Bin.
In March 2018, Polestar Automotive announced a new appointment, with Former Volvo Car Group Vice President of Products Asia Pacific Wu Zhenhao as President of Polestar China. However, in March 2020, Polestar Motors announced a new appointment, Wu Zhenhao was transferred to Volvo Cars Asia Pacific, responsible for strategic and business coordination, and Gao took the position of President of Polestar China, reporting to Polestar CEO Thomas Inglatt. A year later, in March 2021, Polestar appointed Nathan Fauscher as President of Polestar China and Asia Pacific, with overall responsibility for Polestar's China and Asia Pacific business, reporting to Polestar CEO Thomas Inglatt.
Behind the frequent turmoil at the top is the poor development of Polestar Cars. In October 2017, Volvo and Geely jointly announced that Polestar has become an independent electric high-performance car brand, and has joined Geely's new energy product lineup with a new new energy vehicle brand.
As an independent electric high-performance car brand, PoleStar has benchmarked Tesla from the beginning and imitated Tesla's development route. At that time, polestar launched the first model Polestar 1 positioned a two-door sports car, priced as high as 1.45 million yuan, but the performance of polestar 1 is really ugly. According to the association, the Polestar 1 will sell only 24 units in 2020. The industry generally believes that PoleStar 1 is not for sales, but to shape a high-end brand image.
On February 27, 2019, Polestar launched the first pure electric vehicle Polestar 2, which is based on volvo CMA architecture, the current single motor standard endurance version is priced at 258,000 yuan, the single motor long endurance version is priced at 282,800 yuan, and the dual motor long endurance version is priced at 338,000 yuan, directly benchmarking Tesla Model 3, which is considered to be the volume model of Polestar. However, the PoleStar 2 has not become a rival to Tesla Model 3, but has become a popular model in the Chinese market. According to the data, in 2021, the cumulative global sales of Polar Star Automobile will be 29,000 vehicles, but the official did not disclose the specific market performance, and this year Tesla's annual sales in the Chinese market were 295,000 vehicles, and Weilai, Xiaopeng and Ideal, as a new power brand, also approached the 100,000 vehicle level. In the face of slowing sales, PoleStar began to lower its sales targets. Previously, Polestar originally set a sales target of 65,000 units in 2022, but due to the impact of the epidemic and the supply of parts, Polestar Automobile reduced its annual sales target to 50,000 units. On July 13, Polestar released first-half data showing that a total of 21,200 vehicles were delivered in the first half of the year, an increase of 125% year-on-year, and the target was 42%, but did not disclose the specific sales situation in the Chinese market.
In June this year, Polar star automobile announced a picture of the future product line, the models in the picture are PoleStar 2, Polar Star 3, Pole Star 4 and Pole Star 5. According to the plan, Polestar will launch three new cars in the next two years. Among them, the Polestar 3 will be launched worldwide in October this year as a pure electric SUV model, and the Polestar 4 and Polarin 5 will be launched in 2023 and 2024 respectively. Previously, Nathan Fosshao, former president of Polestar China and Asia Pacific, believed that these three products are well adapted to the needs of the Chinese market, like the Polestar 3/4 are SUV models, which is to take into account the preferences of Chinese consumers, but the industry believes that even if Polestar accelerates its product layout, it may still not be able to change its decline in the global market.
Taking Tesla as an example, Tesla's Shanghai Gigafactory has become one of the factories that contribute the most production capacity in its global factories, coupled with the enthusiasm of domestic consumers for Tesla products, the Chinese market has become Tesla's largest single market in the world. In addition, BMW, Mercedes-Benz, Audi, Volkswagen, etc. continue to accelerate the layout of China's new energy vehicle market. It is undeniable that the Chinese market is now crucial to the development of many new energy vehicle companies, but in the past five years since independence, the performance of PoleStar Automobile in China and even the global market is still difficult to make a breakthrough, and its popularity has not been significantly improved.
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