Polestar's Formula 2030 concept points at a Slovakia-built 7 in 2028
Philipp Römers has finally drawn a Polestar from a blank sheet
Polestar released a single photograph on Monday, and it is enough to show the brand is changing direction. The car is called Formula 2030, a concept that will be shown in full in October, and it is the first Polestar designed from nothing by Philipp Römers since he took over the studio. What it previews is not on sale for another year at the very earliest.
Formula 2030 is the first clean-sheet Polestar under Philipp Römers
Römers came from Audi and took over Polestar's design studio in January 2025, replacing Max Missoni, who moved to BMW. Everything Polestar sells today was drawn before he arrived, which makes this concept the first real evidence of where he is taking a brand whose identity has always been its shape rather than its numbers. His own brief was restraint, not reinvention: “Polestar's design and brand is already so strong, it was obvious we needed a bold evolution not revolution of what came before.”
The teaser keeps the Dual Blade lights and adds an aero bridge
The image shows a low, wide-set car with cambered front wheels, a motorsport-style vertical windscreen wiper and an opening in the bonnet that reads as an S-duct, the aerodynamic trick that pulls air through the nose to press it down. The Dual Blade daytime running lights survive, but they now split above and below a thin headlight slot instead of sitting inside one housing. Investors, retailers and selected customers see the car at Polestar's Gothenburg headquarters before anyone else does.
The design lands with the Polestar 2 in 2027 and the Polestar 7 in 2028
Polestar has been specific about what the concept feeds into. The next-generation Polestar 2 is due in 2027, and the Polestar 7, a compact SUV, follows in 2028. That gap is the whole story: a face judged this October will not carry a paying customer until the year after next, and the model expected to sell in the largest numbers is a year behind that again. Nothing on the current price list, from the Polestar 4 downwards, gets any of it.
The Polestar 7 will be built at Volvo's Kosice plant in Slovakia
The Polestar 7 will be the first Polestar assembled in Europe. Volvo Cars will build it at its new plant in Kosice, Slovakia, a plan announced in July 2025 and confirmed again by Polestar in April 2026. Every Polestar a European buyer can order today is an import: the 2, 3 and 5 come from China, the 4 from South Korea. Chief executive Michael Lohscheller has already argued that global carmaking is over and that building where you sell is now the only workable model. Kosice is that argument turned into a factory.
Polestar lost $842 million in six months and lost the United States
The financial backdrop is not subtle. The first-half results published on 3 September showed revenue of $1.4 billion, down 4.4 percent, on retail sales that grew 0.4 percent, and a net loss of $842 million. The loss was 29 percent smaller than a year earlier, but $211 million of it came from unwinding the American business after Washington's connected-vehicle rules blocked Polestar's 2027 model year and forced it out of the market. The shares fell 29.4 percent on the day.
AutoNext Take
October will be judged on the wrong thing. Polestar has never had a styling problem, and a concept costs almost nothing to admire. What it has is a cost problem, and the only line in this announcement that touches it is the Polestar 7. Kosice is the first time the brand builds a car inside the market that buys most of them, which strips shipping, import duty and currency exposure out of its most price-sensitive model in a single move. That is worth more to Polestar than any headlight signature.
So here is the test, and the date is already public. Polestar says Kosice in 2028. If that holds, this concept still looks current when the brand's first European-built car reaches a showroom, and the design story and the industrial story arrive together. If Kosice slips to 2029, Formula 2030 becomes a four-year-old face on a car launched behind two more years of losses, and Polestar will have spent its rebrand before it had anything European to sell. Watch the Kosice start-of-production date, not the October reveal.
