One of South Coast Plaza’s newest tenants aims to turn the Costa Mesa luxury mall into a new hot spot for the local electric vehicle market.
Swedish carmaker Polestar opened its new showroom location at the shopping center this month, marking its most recent expansion in Orange County.
The luxury showroom has been in the works for the past year; it joins another automaker, Porsche Design, in the mall’s Carousel Court on the first level.
The retail store has the first two models, the Polestar 1 and 2, on display, with the latter available for test drives.
The opening day had two of its upcoming models on temporary display—the Polestar 3 SUV, which will be delivered later this year, and the Polestar 6, which is still in the works and expected to start delivery in 2026.
1st EV at SCP
Bringing Polestar to South Coast Plaza and “not just any mall” allows the brand “to intercept so many people coming through,” according to the head of Polestar North America, Gregor Hembrough.
According to Hembrough, the showroom saw around 5,000 people come through during a soft opening the week before.
Polestar isn’t new to OC. The company opened a showroom in downtown Laguna Beach two years ago on Coast Highway with a local service center based in Mission Viejo.
The SCP showroom will be the last OC expansion for now.
Hembrough said that he is excited to see “the echo the mall will bring the brand.”
It’s the first EV company to set up shop at OC’s largest mall, which runs some 2.8 million square feet and counts over 287 tenants. South Coast Plaza brought in over $2 billion in taxable sales last year, a record.
OC’s second-largest shopping center, the Irvine Spectrum, added Vietnam-based automaker VinFast as a tenant early this year. Tesla and Lucid Motors are other luxury EV auto brands that count OC showrooms at Fashion Island, among other retail locations.
Hembrough noted that the Southern California EV market, specifically Los Angeles and OC, is the No. 1 EV segment in the country and twice the size of San Francisco’s.
The Orange County Automobile Dealers Association (OCADA) reported that 21.9% of OC car buyers went electric in 2022.
This is almost four times more than the national average of EV adoption, according to OCADA Executive Director John Sackrison.
“It’s where we need to be,” Hembrough said.
The clientele Polestar serves are already shopping at South Coast, according to Hembrough.
The people in OC are invested in tech, innovation and design, and has what Hembrough calls “an early adopter mentality” as a region that is “willing to try things first.”
Products
Polestar (Nasdaq: PSNY) went public via a reverse merger with a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) in mid-2021 at around $10 per share. Its price jumped to a little over $15 in November later that year.
Shares in the company, which counts ties to Sweden’s Volvo, are currently trading around $3.40 with a market cap of $7.7 billion.
The Polestar 1 was introduced in 2013. The sedan, the Polestar 2, was the company’s first fully electric car to enter the market in 2019, and runs around $48,400.
The upcoming Polestar 3 will be its first SUV, and is expected to sell well in the OC market, Hembrough said.
The Polestar 3 starts at $83,900 with a dual motor that can range up to 300 miles. It can go from 0 to 60 miles per hour in 4.9 seconds.
The SUV will also debut a new LiDAR driver assistance system and will have self-driving features.
Polestar reported that it had surpassed last year’s delivery goal of 50,000 with global volumes of 51,491 for the year, up 80% from 2021.
“2023 is going to be another year of great progress for Polestar as we expand our portfolio and continue to grow our retail network,” said Polestar Chief Executive Thomas Ingenlath during the Swedish firm’s first-quarter report.
Polestar has almost 160 global retail and handover locations and operates in 27 markets worldwide.
There are 31 Polestar spots in the U.S.
