Polestar stops accepting custom Polestar 2 orders because demand is too high
Polestar’s online configurator is no longer accepting new custom Polestar 2 orders, and Polestar says that the reason is because demand is too high for its best-selling vehicle.
Polestar has been having a bit of a rough time lately. While the company’s sales were up 6% in 2023, that’s smaller growth than most of the EV industry has seen. In particular, Polestar’s Q4 numbers ticked down compared to Q3, despite first deliveries of a new model, the Polestar 4, happening in Q4.
Just today, the company received a significant blow as Volvo decided to sever its relationship with Polestar, which was originally spun off from Volvo. This leaves Polestar’s other partner, Geely, and of course Polestar itself, responsible for Polestar’s fate.
However, the Polestar 2 did just get a facelift, and deliveries of that started last quarter. This usually buoys sales of a vehicle line, and often leads to a dropoff in preceding quarters as customers wait for the new version of the car to come out. But between Q3 and Q4, that didn’t happen. Maybe Polestar hasn’t been able to scale production of the facelifted version quickly enough, or maybe customers were just not aware of the facelift, but it’s still odd to see a drop in the quarter that a facelift comes out.
So one might think that things are looking shaky for Polestar, but the company’s order website suggests otherwise.
In recent days, customers have apparently been unable to configure new custom Polestar 2 vehicles in the US. When attempting to do so, Polestar’s configurator website states:
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 stating “check similar cars for fast delivery” to see whether there are any inventory vehicles which match your order.
Upon checking a few different configurations, there do seem to be a good amount of configurations available, at least in Southern california where I checked.
On the UK site, a slightly different error message appears. Certain configurations will say “Configuration not available for factory order. Compare your configuration with available cars,” but some other configurations show that “fast delivery is available” and give a timeline when selected. Either way, no mention of demand across the pond, even though the effect seems to be about the same.
This isn’t the first time this has happened with an EV, though. Lots of EVs end up getting a lot of preorders, to the point where companies shut down additional orders until they can work through the backlog. Tesla has done this several times in the past, here’s one example from 2022.
We reached out for additional comments, and a Polestar rep told us that it’s “temporary and not related to suppliers or production or anything like that”. So not a lot more detail there, but we do know that, currently, you can’t order a custom Polestar configuration, and will have to either wait until the configurator is reopened, or look for an inventory vehicle instead.
Electrek’s Take
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.
This narrative is, in so many words, wrong. EV demand isn’t down, it’s up, and so are EV sales. In order to find any indication of slowing growth in EVs, you have to go to the second derivative of an EV sales chart. It would be more accurate to say that percentage growth of EV sales is lower now than it has been in the past, but that’s a natural result of the base number getting larger – 100 -> 1,000 is a 10x increase, but 1,000 -> 5,000 is merely a 5x increase, despite clearly being a much larger increase in raw volume.
Meanwhile, gas car sales actually are going down, and yet that narrative is not widely reported on. It looks like gas vehicle sales peaked at 2017 and will likely never recover to that level, while EV sales continue to rise.
However, there can be headwinds for certain individual brands (e.g. tax credit availability, NACS support coming but not yet implemented, supply disruptions, and so on). And Polestar is one of the brands that is growing more slowly than others lately, especially when it is relatively smaller in terms of deliveries, and therefore should have an easier time producing higher percentage growth than a larger company might (see the small/large number comparison above).
So it actually is strange to see this notification on Polestar’s website, given the company’s more modest recent growth. We’d like to understand a little more about what kind of numbers we’re dealing with here, but in absence of that it looks like shoppers will just have to scrounge around a bit for the time being to find a car close to what they want.
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China just connected its largest single-capacity solar farm built on a former coal mining area, which is in the Gobi Desert, to the grid.
The Mengxi Blue Ocean Photovoltaic Power Station, located in Otog Front Banner, Ordos, Inner Mongolia, came online on November 5. With a massive installed capacity of 3 gigawatts (GW) and over 5.9 million solar panels, the plant will generate around 5.7 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity annually – enough to power 2 million households.
This huge project will save about 1.71 million tons of standard coal each year and cut carbon dioxide emissions by roughly 4.7 million tons, which is equivalent to planting 62,700 hectares (around 155,000 acres) of trees.
Built on coal mining subsidence land, Mengxi Blue Ocean is part of China’s national West-East Electricity Transfer Project, which brings investment and development to western China west while supplying the growing need for electricity in the eastern provinces.
The solar farm includes the country’s first large-scale outdoor solar testing base in the Gobi Desert climate, demonstrating the potential for large solar installations in challenging environments.
The power station makes use of new rare earth alloy grounding materials, cutting costs by 40%. It also replaces traditional concrete foundations with steel to minimize impact on the local grassland ecosystem.
Chuang Xihong, deputy director of the Engineering Construction Department of Guodian Power Group, CHN Energy’s parent company, explained that Mengxi Blue Ocean is an agrivoltaic project as well [via PV Tech]:
Fine forage and sand-fixing plants are planted under the PV modules, providing grazing for Australian White Sheep and chickens. A composite ecological development model will be established where PV power generation and breeding will go hand in hand.
Read more: China powers up the world’s largest open-sea offshore solar farm
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