While the Citroën – Polestar conflict still seemed to escalate at the start of the summer, it is an appeasement between the two car manufacturers that marks the start of the 2022 school year.
The start of the school year may be marked by the end of a preposterous situation preventing the Polestar brand from marketing its 100% electric models in France. Citroën had managed to block the brand’s introduction in France because of a dark history of logo resemblance. In an article published on August 31, 2022 on Le Monde, we learn that an agreement between the two brands would have been reached after several years of conflict. Which would finally lift the banishment of Polestar in France.
A sign that the situation is unblocking, the Polestar site, which until now was inaccessible from France, is now freely available. We are only waiting for announcements from Polestar on its commercial ambitions in our territory, 3 years behind the rest of Europe.
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Citroën had succeeded in blocking Polestar on French territory because of its logo. Polestar, a Volvo Group brand, was launched with a stylized North Star logo. The problem is that this star was imagined with two opposing chevrons. It was enough for Citroën, the chevron brand, to denounce a resemblance to its own identity, and attack Polestar.
Citroën was successful in the face of French justice, which declared in 2020 that “ the Polestar company has damaged the reputation of the French brands n° 3422762 and n° 3841054 owned by the Citroën company “. The complaint indeed covered as much the logo of Citroën as that of DS. Polestar then had to pay €150,000 to Citroën and was prohibited from using its logo in France.
It is difficult for a car brand to be able to sell in a country without its visual marker. France was therefore excluded from the development of the brand, which did not wait for the end of the conflict with Citroën to take advantage of it to market its models in other European countries. The Polestar 2 is also a vehicle that has met with some success in several countries. Over the first 6 months of 2022, the brand sold 21,000 vehicles, and is aiming for 50,000 units by the end of the year.
In the meantime, in France, when one wanted to know more about Polestar by going to its site, the user only saw the following message ” The Polestar site is not accessible to the French public due to territorial restrictions on the use of French trademarks n°016898173 and n°01689532. It was impossible to consult it without going through a VPN.
A situation that continued to escalate
At the beginning of July, we learned that Citroën wanted to extend its complaint, concerning the Polestar logo, before a European court. There is no doubt that the objective was to block the brand on the other markets where Citroën is historically established. But, it is more certainly on the markets targeted by its premium brand DS that the fight was played out.
Except that, according to Le Monde, the complaint was unsuccessful. Polestar did not stay behind, because the brand had in turn attacked Citroën for rims a little too similar to its own. Eye for eye, tooth for tooth.
This agreement between the two brands therefore comes by surprise at the end of August 2022, because there was no indication that Citroën would give in – the circumstances in which this relaxation was decided are not clear. All that for this ? Not sure that Citroën and DS come out stronger from this fight. Especially since similar logos, there are more than one.
Without even knowing if Polestar will quickly launch the marketing of its models in France, we are already happy to know that the brand can do so. Polestar is quite prolific on concept cars, we were frustrated not to have access to them because of the conflict between them and Citroën.