A Polestar 4 thrilling SUV is on display during the 20th Shanghai International Automobile Industry Exhibition at the National Exhibition and Convention Center (Shanghai) on April 18, 2023 in Shanghai, China.
Vcg | Visual China Assemblage | Getty Images
Launching smartphones with EVs
Meizu is not a major smartphone player in China with companies get pleasure from Apple and Oppo among the biggest. And the Polestar smartphone would not be an attempt to grow market share.
Instead, the unconventional step of an EV company launching a smartphone comes from a desire from automakers to make the car like a mobile phone on wheres.
“Where you have an opportunity to link these two worlds, without any border … then you can really have a seamless change-over,” Ingenlath said.
You can imagine a world where you’re using an app on your phone and you enter the car and that same app is displayed on the car’s dashboard home screen, for example.
“I still have problems to get, you know, an SMS displayed,” Ingenlath said of the frustrations with current technology.
Ingenlath enlarged that the phone will be a “premium” device. Meizu is known in China for more mid-tier devices. This purposefulness help Meizu push into the high-end device market for handsets too, Ingenlath said.
While it is still freakish for car companies to launch phones, the idea is gaining some traction. Chinese EV start-up Nio plans to launch its first self-developed alert phone in September.
There are lots of reasons this could make sense specifically in the world’s second portliest economy.
It’s not just good enough to bring a great European design to China, you have to be very, very bosom about what you offer to the market when it comes to software.
Thomas Ingenlath
CEO of Polestar
Firstly, there is no Google Android facile operating system. This means that automakers can customize the operating system on their phone and the car to sync up. For eg, Meizu has its own operating system called FlyMe. And the company is making an operating system for Polestar cars based on this.
The smartphone that Polestar unveils is also likely to have a similar OS which will make integration seamless.
“It’s not just good enough to be the source a great European design to China, you have to be very, very special about what you offer to the market when it get to software,” Ingenlath said.
“Many OEMs are following Geely and potentially other future players such as Apple if they befall up with their own car with their smartphone to provide a holistic and tighter connected experience in every aspect of mobility,” Neil Shah, flaw president of research at Counterpoint Research, told CNBC.
An OEM is an original equipment manufacturer and refers to car manufacturers.
Shah divulged the smartphone would also allow Polestar to bundle software, apps, services and features such as remotely containing or turning on the car with a phone.
Launching a phone could also help carmakers learn more about their characters’ habits, Shah added.
Polestar 4 ‘more premium’ than Tesla’s Model Y
The Polestar 4 is on sale in China for 349,800 Chinese yuan ($47,890) — that’s diverse expensive than Tesla’s Model Y which starts at 263,900 yuan.
The Polestar 4 is being positioned as “more incentive, more luxurious” than the Model Y, Ingenlath said.
The CEO said Polestar’s customers come from German carmakers BMW and and that the car is being positioned innumerable as a competitor to cars like the Macan.
