Sep 17, 2023

The EV maker's blockchain-based supply-chain tracing effort gives potential buyers a glimpse into where its car components originate, which may help it comply with coming EU battery regulations. A Polestar 3 EV on display at the TechBBQ conference in Copenhagen. (Credit: Rob Pegoraro) COPENHAGEN–One of the features that Polestar hopes will get the attention of potential car customers isn’t anywhere on the inside or outside of its luxury electric vehicles. Instead, its a series of data reports on its website. The Gothenburg, Sweden-based automaker (set up as a joint venture between Volvo and Volvo’s Chinese parent firm Geely) has leaned into transparency about its manufacturing and operations as one way to distinguish itself from other EV makers. “One of the most common questions we get from customers is around sustainability,” said Lisa Bolin, climate lead at Polestar, in an interview at the TechBBQ conference here after she had spoken on a panel about the automaker’s transparency efforts. In May 2021 , the company inked a partnership with Circulor , a London firm that had already been using its blockchain -based system to trace cobalt supplies for Polestar’s batteries, to track more of the components going into its vehicles and also tally the carbon-dioxide emissions generated along that entire supply chain. Tracing raw materials back to mines is not an easy task and risks revealing ugly truths about how labor rights and environmental protection are neglected in countries that happen to hold most of the world’s resources of these minerals, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo. “Some of the raw materials that we source, they are not available from too many places in the world,” Bolin said. “Tracing, auditing and all of this is costly." Seated across a table from Bolin, Circulor chief external affairs officer Ellen Carey offered a high-level overview of how that firm goes about that task, starting at individual mines. “It’s multiple inputs,” Carey said, ranging from “very precise geolocation” to verifying exact delivery times and weights, that allow Circulor to build a “digital twin” model of each shipment and give it confidence that people haven’t tried to cook the books. For batteries in the Polestar 2 sedan, Circular tracks cobalt and mica; for the upcoming Polestar 3 SUV, it will also trace lithium and nickel. Circulor stores this data in an Oracle Hyperledger-based private blockchain –a solution that combines the immutability of a digital ledger with the access controls that the company and its clients need. Circular has also done work for Volkswagen Group, Mercedes-Benz, and Volvo,  as well as various firms further down the EV supply chain . “It's a private, permission-based blockchain,” said Carey, who also spoke at the TechBBQ conference. “Our key thing is to have confidentiality.” The results as seen on Polestar’s site suggest how much of this data doesn’t leave its offices. “Product Sustainability Declarations” posted for the Polestar 2 and Polestar 3 outline supply-chain risks (in cobalt’s case, “forced labor and child labor, corruption, weak rule of law, high-intensity conflicts, and pollution from hazardous materials”) and say Polestar uses Circulor’s system to confirm that it only gets these minerals from suppliers that comply with its rules. But they don’t name or categorize suppliers, and Polestar’s Sustainability Report also sticks to high-level goals. In comparison, Tesla’s 2022 Impact Report (PDF) provides more detail in its breakout of the automaker’s work to source more of its minerals directly and then audit its suppliers for compliance. But it only cites one test of digital tracing of raw materials for a single battery–which itself involved the mining firm BHP using Circulor’s system, Reuters reported last summer. Polestar surfaces more data in the “Life Cycle Assessments” it posts for its vehicles, which use Circulor research to compute the carbon footprint of an individual electric vehicle and when its lower energy consumption will recoup the higher carbon intensity of building an EV. Recommended by Our Editors