Interview: Polestar Design Director Max Missoni on the Future Look of Volvo’s Premium Electric Brand

For most automotive designers, taking their CEO through a design review can be a fraught process. The auto industry is mostly run by accountants and engineers, number crunchers who rely on systems and processes to produce something that sells on emotion. Polestar design director Max Missoni has a slightly different challenge, however: His boss, Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath, is himself a designer.

When Ingenlath left Volkswagen to become head of Volvo design in 2012, he brought with him to Sweden the Austrian-born Missoni, who'd worked for the German automaker since graduating from London's Royal College of Art in 2002. Missoni was made vice president of exterior design for Volvo in 2014, and in 2018 he became Polestar's design director after Ingenlath was made CEO of the premium electric vehicle brand.

Missoni has been involved with Polestar since the beginning. The concept coupe he drew became Polestar 1, he's overseen the design of the new Polestar 2 and the forthcoming Polestar 3 SUV, and his sleek, clinically crisp Polestar Precept concept shows where he wants to take the brand in design terms over the next decade.

What's it like doing a design review for a CEO who's a designer himself?

I think the big difference between a design review with a CEO who comes from the engineering side and a CEO who used to be a designer himself is twofold. One is you know that he knows. You don't have the advantage of experience where you can say, "What do you know? I know this better than you." But you don't have to explain so much. You can just say, "You know what I mean, right?" Thomas totally gets that, and that's the big advantage. There's much less complication.

In terms of its design language, the Polestar Precept is quite a step-change from what we've seen from Polestar so far. Why?

Polestar 1 and 2 were partially rooted in the Volvo design language that we all came up with seven years ago. Those cars found a home in Polestar because they were quite extreme to start with and didn't really fit into the Volvo lineup. But it is now time to say, "Look, this is our plan for the future. This is how pure and how progressive we want to look like." And all the design features in the Precept come from aerodynamics and technology. They're not just styling.

You're trying to communicate the Precept's technology and capability through design rather than just making a pleasing shape for the hell of it?

Big innovation in design normally happens when there is technology innovation. In the periods in between it's mostly for the hell of it. You try something else because, "Hey, we have a successor, it's pretty much the same spec as the predecessor, we just have to get people excited about that car again." And the more you can stick to the system solutions of the predecessor, the better your margins might be. We had the chance to create a new design language for a brand here and said, "OK, let's embrace those things." In other, more legacy-driven companies, you don't want to alienate anybody who has liked you the last 50 years.

Is the world ready for a new aesthetic? How difficult is it to lead rather than to follow?

I personally don't believe in doing a very new or different proportion just for the sake of it. If it's not driven by any technology, we shouldn't make it different. We also know that as a small challenger, we need to give people a reason to get excited about us, and apart from technology, design does that. We really believe in inspiring people and not necessarily following recommendations. The consumer electronics-inspired design language is what gives the Precept freshness.

You're also still working on Volvo exteriors with the Volvo team. That's a very different mission …

At the moment I'm this split personality. I have the clean sheet business going on with Polestar, and I have to evolve Volvo, to take what we have created into a next generation. It's a hell of a ride, but it's great. It's exciting to do both things at the same time, to try to carefully move a 100-year-old, 90-year-old brand into the next generation while at the same time I have a clean sheet and can go, "OK, now if we could do what we wanted to, what would we do?"