At Swedish EV company Polestar, bio-material design and innovation are completely rewriting the script on what a car interior can be.
For Maria Uggla, Head of Colour and Material Design at Polestar, innovation means rejecting the binary of performance versus sustainability. Instead the impetus is to embrace both with equal intensity.
“People often talk about compromise,” Uggla says, “but we don’t do that. Our job is to create desire for the right choice.” That guiding ethos runs through Polestar’s approach to everything, including materiality. Sustainability is never an afterthought, it’s an active design parameter, one that demands as much creativity and rigour as the form of the car itself.
At the heart of the company’s philosophy is a commitment to non-traditional approaches, which is applied to materiality. For example, the seat backrest on the Polestar 3 is made from BComp a flax-based bio-composite – this new and alternative material took three years of R&D to bring to market. But this is just one example of how long-term thinking and collaboration can yield groundbreaking results. “People didn’t realise how immature that material was when we started,” Uggla recalls. “We had to prove it could work in an automotive context.”
Through this willingness to start from scratch, Uggla has led textile experiments inspired not by the auto industry, but by fashion. Flat-knitted recycled polyester, influenced by Nike’s Flyknit, was developed using advanced weaving techniques that allow for zero waste and create a pre-programmed structure. “Textile in automotive is usually the lowest of the low. We wanted to elevate it – make it desirable,” Uggla says.
A key part of Polestar’s process is the early-stage development of “material scenarios”, which map out potential lifecycles, sources and applications for each material before a design is locked in. For Polestar 3, this meant reducing virgin materials, sourcing waste-derived alternatives, and designing with circularity in mind from the outset. “We’re constantly exploring how to create better material generations,” Uggla explains.
Transparency underpins it all. Polestar’s Life Cycle Assessments (LCAs) are published for each model, with full emissions disclosures and material impact breakdowns. “It’s complicated,” Uggla admits, adding, “But showing that complexity is how we avoid greenwashing. Sustainability isn’t a trend – it’s a necessity.”
The future of car interiors might not be stitched in leather or moulded in plastic, but rather grown, woven, pressed and reimagined.
