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Polestar began as Volvo's performance partner in motorsport, working with the carmaker from 1996 before Volvo bought Polestar Performance outright in 2015. In June 2017 Volvo Cars announced it would become a standalone, separately branded electrified high-performance car company, building its own cars with no Volvo logo, aimed, Reuters reported, at competing with Tesla and Mercedes-AMG. Volvo's head of design, Thomas Ingenlath, became chief executive.

The company's own account of the identity sets out three principles: pure, progressive, performance. The old star had sat on a bright cyan plastic square that Volvo owners displayed proudly, but the colour, not the star, was the strongest element. So the star was freed from its square and reduced in a series of iterations until only two wings remained, set diagonally with the space between them completing the shape and a slight vertical offset adding tension. Each wing carries a diagonal crease on its top surface, so the badge on the car is crisp without a single piece of chrome. A minimal typographic marking system runs through cars, showrooms, events and stationery, in a strictly monochrome palette.

The brand was introduced at a launch event in Shanghai on 17 October 2017. Ingenlath described Polestar as the guiding star for Volvo, embracing connectivity, car sharing and new types of ownership.

The identity won a Red Dot award, with the jury praising its reduction to essentials and its minimalist elegance.

Polestar's own journal explains the symbol. The old star lived on a bright cyan plastic square that Volvo owners displayed proudly, but the colour was doing most of the work, so the star had to be freed from its base. It was reduced over several iterations until only two wings remained, set diagonally with a slight vertical offset, the gap between them completing the shape. Autoevolution's editor asked whether it looked like two Citroën chevrons facing each other. Fair, but the tension in that offset is what makes it a signature rather than a borrowing.

It deserves the praise. In an industry of chrome crests and shields, Polestar's star is quiet, precise and instantly ownable, and the monochrome discipline makes the cars look like objects rather than ads. The risk is that minimalism this severe can read as cold, but for a brand built to signal engineering seriousness, cold works.