At the start of the year, executives at electric carmaker Polestar drew up ambitious sales plans for the UK. Within weeks, they had to tear them up.
Demand was rising so quickly that the new targets were a third higher. Today the Volvo-backed company runs around 1,000 test drives a month in the UK alone. Each week, new spaces are booked up within an hour of becoming available.
Until four years ago, Polestar specialised in tuning high performance combustion engines: now it has been transformed into one of the companies trying to tap the booming demand for battery cars. “This isn’t the niche market it was two or three years ago,” says Polestar’s UK boss Jonathan Goodman.