Polestar’s carbon hunter plans to make everybody's EVs even cleaner

Fredrika Klarén isn’t a huge fan of Hamburg, Germany. 

Her personal climate constitution affords one international flight a year, so most of her travel from her home in Gothenburg, Sweden, is by train. Hamburg is the hub where she often misses a connection to Brussels or London or Paris or any number of places across the continent.

Klarén, however, is head of sustainability at Polestar, a Gothenburg-based electric vehicle maker; she has to walk the climate walk, no matter how irksome and inconvenient.

“I don’t know what it is, but I find myself literally nauseous when I fill up a petrol car,” she explains.

Klarén’s corporate rivals aren’t nearly as austere, and they’ve spent the past few months pumping the brakes on electric car production. She cashed in last year’s flight zipping to United Nations climate talks in Dubai, and only noticed two other car companies at the summit.

“I’m starting to see a trend where they aren’t coming to the table,” she says. “I mean, an industry that stands for 15% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t even show up? Come on!”

To be fair, among the world’s 14 million or so autoworkers, Klarén is an anomaly. The industry has people tracking the cost and quality of each widget. Carbon, however, has only recently entered the equation.

In the U.S. alone, there are 283 million cars, trucks and buses. Transportation accounts for nearly 30% of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. Manufacturing, maintenance and the hardware needed to break vehicles down when they're done being useful can add even more emissions.

Polestar saw these figures as an opportunity to do more than just make EVs. When it was spun out of Volvo in 2017, it made sustainability its North Star — a brand guidepost akin to “luxury” at Mercedes Benz or “performance” at Ferrari. No other car company has been as thorough and transparent in measuring how dirty its operations are and working to clean them.

Make no mistake, that’s both a climate strategy and a corporate strategy. Someone torn, for example, between a Polestar and a Ford may notice that the latter doesn’t put a carbon figure on its cars. If that person cares