Polestar said on Wednesday it has appointed Arek Nowinski to its Board of Directors, replacing Francesca Gamboni, who is retiring from the board.
Both are Volvo Cars executives, and the substitution changes what the seat represents.
Gamboni runs manufacturing, procurement and supply chain at Volvo Cars and sits on its management board.
Nowinski runs sales in a group of regions, and his own LinkedIn profile describes the remit as Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Africa and Asia Pacific excluding China — a scope qualifier that does not appear in Polestar’s announcement.
Winfried Vahland, Polestar’s chair, said he was pleased to welcome Nowinski, “who brings significant commercial expertise and experience, as Polestar enters a phase of model expansion and sales network development across existing and new markets.”
The stated rationale is unusually specific about what the company thinks it needs, and it is not manufacturing.
The Seat Has a History
Gamboni did not join the board as an independent director.
When Polestar set out its 2024 annual general meeting agenda in September of that year, it described her as proposed to replace Jim Rowan, then Volvo Cars chief executive, as the Volvo Cars representative on the Board of Directors.
The seat was designated, and it passed from Volvo’s chief executive to Volvo’s manufacturing chief.
Wednesday’s announcement does not repeat that designation.
Nowinski is described only as replacing Gamboni, with no reference to Volvo Cars holding a representative position, which leaves open whether the seat is still formally Volvo’s or has simply been filled by another Volvo executive.
Volvo Cars owned roughly 48% of Polestar before February 2024, when it distributed the bulk of its holding to Geely Sweden Holdings, and a $200 million equity investment by Li Shufu’s PSD Investment in June 2025 diluted it further.
Debt-to-equity conversions this year have moved the stake back up: announcing the March 31 conversion, Polestar said Volvo Cars’ ownership would remain at approximately 19.9%.
That figure sits immediately below the 20% threshold at which an investor is generally presumed to exercise significant influence over an investee, and the company has not commented on whether the level is deliberate.
What Changed in Nowinski’s Own Remit
Nowinski’s career at Volvo Cars has moved in one direction over the past two years, and the direction is narrower.
His LinkedIn profile records him as senior vice president and president of Volvo Cars EMEA from June 2022 to November 2024, a two-and-a-half-year run covering Europe, the Middle East and Africa.
He then became president of international markets, a brief listed as covering Europe, the United States and Canada, Asia Pacific excluding China, Latin America and global importers — the widest commercial remit of his career — for seven months.
That was followed by president for Europe and the rest of the world, from April 2025 to November 2025, a period of eight months.
His current role drops Western Europe, North America and Latin America from the brief.
Three commercial roles in roughly fourteen months, each narrower than the last, is the record a reader can check on the profile Polestar’s own announcement points to, and the company has not commented on it.
The profile also does not list the current role in its dated experience section, where the Volvo Cars block ends in November 2025, though a profile can be incomplete and the omission establishes nothing on its own.
The Expertise Being Swapped Out
Gamboni’s value to the board was industrial.
Polestar’s own governance page describes her as chief manufacturing and supply chain officer at Volvo Cars, credited with advancing efficiency, sustainability and localisation in Volvo’s supply chain, with prior senior roles at Accell Group, Stellantis, Renault-Nissan, Alcan and Bosch.
She holds a master of science in industrial technology engineering from Politecnico di Milano.
Nowinski holds a master of science in international finance from the University of Derby and a master of arts in finance and banking from the Warsaw School of Economics, and spent twelve and a half years as president of Volvo Cars Poland before moving to Gothenburg.
Polestar is losing the only director who currently holds an operating manufacturing role, at a point when the company has told investors it is accelerating efforts to become leaner and improve manufacturing efficiencies, is consolidating Polestar 3 production in South Carolina, and plans to build the Polestar 7 at Volvo’s Kosice plant in Slovakia.
Industrial experience does remain on the board, though not in a serving operating capacity: Karl-Thomas Neumann holds a doctorate in microelectronics, sat on Continental’s executive board and later chaired it, ran Volkswagen’s company-wide electric propulsion programme and was chairman and president of Opel, while chair Winfried Vahland holds a master’s in mechanical engineering and once chaired Skoda Auto.
The Board This Joins
The change follows a period of heavy turnover that reaches well beyond the boardroom.
Four directors left the board in June 2025, and Vahland himself took the chair only in October 2024, succeeding Håkan Samuelsson.
Gamboni’s tenure runs to roughly 22 months from that same annual general meeting, one of the shorter stints on a board that has struggled to settle.
The executive ranks have turned over faster still.
Chief executive Thomas Ingenlath, who had run Polestar since joining from Volvo Cars in July 2017, was pushed out by Geely in October 2024 and succeeded by Michael Lohscheller; design chief Maximilian Missoni left for BMW the same month.
The chief financial officer was replaced weeks later, the chief commercial officer was swapped out in January, and the head of North America departed after less than a year.
Head of software Sven Bauer left in July after more than three years, as the company continued to struggle with software problems across its production models, and EV was unable to establish whether he went voluntarily.
Bauer had joined in April 2023 from Cariad, Volkswagen Group’s in-house software subsidiary.
Read against that ledger, Wednesday’s appointment continues a pattern rather than interrupting it: the company has lost its software chief, its design chief and now the one director whose background is building cars, while adding commercial expertise at board level.
Creditor and Shareholder
The board seat makes more sense alongside the balance sheet than alongside the share register.
Volvo Cars converted roughly $274 million of its shareholder loan into equity on March 31 and extended the maturity of the remainder from December 2028 to December 2031, a three-year deferral.
That remainder stood at $726 million until a second conversion of about $66 million on June 30, which completed $640 million of conversions alongside Geely Sweden and left Volvo’s outstanding loan at approximately $660 million.
A shareholder of just under 20% that is also owed roughly two thirds of a billion dollars, maturing in 2031, has an interest in the boardroom that its equity stake alone understates.
