Polestar 2
Volvo’s new electrified performance brand makes its big introductory statement with a rival to the Tesla Model 3
Does Tesla have a fight on its hands?
In the autumn of his career, former England football coach Sven-göran Eriksson had a short, ill-fated stint on the management team at one of England’s oldest clubs: Notts County. Remember that? Of course you don’t. I didn’t either. Thankfully, Wikipedia does.
Eriksson may not be the Swedish institution that you were expecting this review to reference, but here’s the thing. During Eriksson’s Notts County tenure, one of the many inexplicable decisions made by the club’s board was retaining the services of the incumbent manager, having hired the Scandinavian to rule the roost. Why? Well, they were awash with money, or so they said. More to the point, Eriksson had been appointed to the dreaded ‘director of football’ position.
This peculiar management hierarchy brings to mind the executive situation at f ledgling car brand Polestar. This isn’t a company suddenly awash with spare cash or operated by opportunist crooks, as
Notts County reportedly was at the time. But if we liken Polestar CEO Thomas Ingenlath (an Autocar Award winner as a Volvo designer, risen to rare executive-level heights) to Eriksson, that makes Polestar’s head of design our useful equivalent of overshadowed Notts County manager of 2007-2009, Mr Ian Mcparland (you’re welcome, pubquizzers). And that man’s name (albeit less likely to come up in the Dog & Duck’s sunday-night brain teaser) is Maximilian Missoni.
Funnily enough, Missoni is clearly no stooge. He defines the significance of the Polestar 2, his employer’s new Tesla Model 3 rival, in a really insightful way. “This car was originally designed as a Volvo concept car,” he says, referring to the 40.2, a 2016 creation intended to test the water for a compact Volvo saloon of the future. “But when Thomas and I saw it on the stand, there was this moment. We realised that the car was different from the rest of the Volvo family.” Missoni explains that his team hadn’t designed a Volvo at all but, quite inadvertently, a Polestar instead.
We might usefully think of the 2 not as the second car to roll out as a fully fledged Polestar model, then, but the first true Polestar. This is an electric fastback saloon with a hatchback rear end, sized and priced like the Model 3. But Polestar hopes it will tempt people out of their Audis, BMWS, Mercedes and higher-end Volkswagens as well.
Its fairly tall, chunkily geometric proportions certainly make it look like something entirely fresh – different from a Tesla, a Volvo, a Mercedes or anything else for that matter. It’s ‘urban’ and ‘robotic’, as described by Missoni. The glasshouse is quite visor-like, its volumes unusually straight and square. It’s precisely the sort of thing you might come up with if you just happened to be designing a car in opposition to a curvy, slimfeatured Tesla. Strangely enough, though, at least as far as Missoni’s account goes, that’s not how the 2 was penned at all.
The interior is equally modern, slick in its layout and quite neatly and sparsely provisioned. This is the ‘vegan interior’ that grabbed Polestar so many headlines at unveiling time last year. It allegedly uses significantly less plastic than most car interiors and more of the recycled stuff, while not as many of the harsh, environmentally nasty chemicals that component manufacturers rely on are associated with the making of its various mouldings and ingredients.
The major surfaces do look and feel unusual, but not in any way cheap or unpleasant. Some are harder than others and a few are just coarse or flimsy enough to begin to raise an eyebrow. By and large, though, the standard of perceived quality is good.
The driving position is different, too. You sit up quite high in the 2, but the beltline is high and enveloping also, so you’re not instantly aware of the raised hip point. The cabin isn’t hugely spacious, but four adults of average height are likely to fit comfortably enough.
Up front, you’re met with a simplified digital instrument display and a portrait-oriented, tablet-like touchscreen infotainment system that apes Tesla’s in its philosophy but is designed to integrate fully with an Android smartphone and mimic one for usability. It works very well, and Apple Carplay functionality is due to be added next year for iphone users.
Under those striking body panels, meanwhile, the 2 has an all-steel chassis with a motor at each axle, and therefore four driven wheels. There’s 78kwh of lithium ion battery capacity along the transmission tunnel and under the seats.
Interestingly, the 2 is a good 200kg heavier than the equivalent 75kwh Model 3. That weight, Polestar claims, comes from it having made the chassis sufficiently rigid to meet its dynamic ambitions for the car, as well as sufficiently crash-safe to represent its Volvo-brand roots in the right way. It’s a veiled dig, that, but one that’s unlikely to be lost on anyone who has read so many news stories about the rather mixed crash performance of certain other EVS.
The 2’s suspension set-up consists of struts at the front and a multilink axle at the rear. Here, the main bauble that owners will be offered is the £5000 Performance package, which augments the car’s mechanical specification with lowered steel coil springs, manually adjustable Ohlins monotube dampers, 20in forged alloy wheels and beefed-up Brembo brakes. The visual signifier inside is gold seatbelts (they’re nice, actually).
Our test car was fitted with the Performance package and, in factory tune, was surprisingly firm-riding. Although more comfortable over long-wave bumps, it had the bristling, slightly tetchy close body control of a competition special over sharper and more sudden inputs. Apparently, Polestar chose a standard ride tune for the optional Ohlins set-up that would allow buyers to feel where their £5000 had gone. That tune, in my book, doesn’t suit an otherwise rapid but effortless electric car well. If this 2 were mine, I would certainly be keen to find the damper adjustment knobs (they’re on the bottom of the inverted front struts and hidden behind panels up inside the rear wheel arches, if you fancy twiddling).
Even allowing for the over-damped low-speed ride, though, there’s an honesty, simplicity and no-nonsense directness about the 2 that you can easily warm to. It doesn’t make mock engine noises. It doesn’t have driving modes. It doesn’t even have a starter button: you just get in, put your foot on the brake pedal, nudge the gear selector into D and set off.
You can choose whether you want lots of ‘one-pedal-driving’ battery regeneration, just a little or none at all. Also whether or not you want the car to creep forward when you lift off the brake pedal at a standstill and
❝ Well-paced steering commands a car that handles with loads of grip and surprisingly taut lateral body control ❞
how heavy you want the steering.
Whether you go for heavy or light steering, the wheel feels a bit gluey and over-assisted, with little genuine tactile feel. Even so, the rack is well-paced, and it commands a car that handles with loads of grip and surprisingly taut lateral body control when you start to press on a little bit.
You expect the 2 to roll when it’s cornering, because of its weight and its profile, but no. It’s really taut and super-secure, taking a cornering line quickly and easily and sticking to it with real tenacity. You can pour on mid-corner torque without running short of adhesion, without rousing the traction control to intrude and without pushing either axle wide. And you can carry big speeds should you want to, encouraged by a simple, incorruptible kind of handling precision that you may not expect to find in any car as heavy as this one.
The walloping, instant roll-on acceleration of the 2 is, thanks largely to Tesla, something most EV buyers will expect to find, of course, and there’s plenty of that. Likewise the strangely textureless quality of the 2’s performance, which, seamless and potent as it is, makes it perhaps more likely to momentarily amuse you now and again than to keep you coming back time after time.
You might well buy a 2, or more likely lease one, given how appealing the case has been made for electric company cars. It’s certainly usable enough. Its 292 miles of official range might prove to be more like 200 if our testing was any indication. That’s not outstanding, granted, but it’s more or less what the Jaguar I-pace returns and would suffice for a great many.
If you do buy one, it might be because you like a bit of a challenge – an enigma, even. Is this a driver’s car, you’ll ask yourself. Is it even the electric car, the down-the-line Tesla rival, or the 2020s son of Volvo you expected? Quite plainly it is, and yet it isn’t. The 2 is one of those cars that still evades definition 24 hours after your first drive in it, I can assure you, and that’s likely to continue for some time afterwards. That may even be its most refreshing and likeable quality.