The Daily Telegraph - Saturday - Saturday
The electric car that could give Tesla a nasty shock
Thomas Ingenlath, Polestar CEO and former Volkswagen head designer, bears an uncanny resemblance to Hollywood star Tom Cruise as he walks and talks his way around the new batteryelectric Polestar 2 family car during an online presentation.
Any moment now, you think, blackclad baddies will emerge from a helicopter gunship and Cruise/Ingenlath will vault over the bonnet and engage in a bit of martial arts.
What did he say? I don’t remember much, but there was a lot about the cool Swedish design (in fact it started life as a Volvo concept), but not so much about the Chinese money behind the venture. This comes from Geely, which also owns Volvo, Lotus, Proton, taxi maker London EV Company, Yuan Cheng Automotive and tyro battery-SUV maker Lynk & Co.
Polestar is one of those made-up car marques designed to take it to Elon Musk’s Tesla and the like, in the process confusing the market and creating barriers to newcomers. You might also observe it is China’s way of leveraging its low labour and land costs and its technical lead in battery chemistry and production to gain a stranglehold on car-making – you might then choose to reflect on quite how Europe’s car makers and governments have allowed this situation to develop.
Suffice to say, it’s 5,083 miles as the crow flies between Polestar’s headquarters in Gothenburg, Sweden and Geely’s in China, but the links between them are a lot closer. For the moment, this car is built in Luqiao, China.
It’s a cracking-looking thing. The blacked-out windscreen pillars emphasise the cantilever roof, a strip of rear lights curls around the back like Hercule Poirot’s moustache and the profile is terrific; more battery-powered hot rod than executive hatchback.
Bum notes include ungainly body overhangs at both ends, while the grille looks truly awful, like a cheap camping mat left in the mud at Glastonbury.
Under the all-steel body, this isn’t quite the architecture we have become used to, where you essentially build the car on top of a slab of batteries. Volvo’s Compact Modular Architecture platform, on which this car is based, is also designed to accommodate a rear-drive combustion engine and so has a big transmission tunnel along the centre.
Add in MacPherson-strut front and multi-link independent rear suspension and, blimey, you could be sitting in a BMW 3-Series. By tucking some of the battery cells into the central tunnel the driver can sit lower, which feels more familiar and sporting than the driving position in rivals.
While the drama of the bodywork is exciting and different, the interior is fairly conventional, including the 11inch Volvo-style portrait touchscreen in the centre. We’re all supposed to get excited about the Google Androidpowered software, and while the screen appears to be based on Volvo’s, the graphics are sharper and the conHEAVY trol software more intuitive. All round, the accommodation is generous and cosseting. The front seats anchor you firmly and the driving position is electrically adjustable. There’s plenty of storage space, too. The rear bench will seat a couple of adults with head and leg room to spare, along with a child straddling the tunnel, although the big glass sunroof restricts headroom.
First impressions are that it lacks the sheer theatre of the Tesla Model 3 with its single central touchscreen, but the Polestar is much easier to use and safer, too, because its conventional instrument binnacle for speed, range and directions means the driver spends less time with his eyes away from the road.
The bonnet hides a 35-litre circular compartment for cables and other grubby bits. A large tailgate accesses the 405-litre boot, which has a low lip for ease of loading a weekly shop. The Model 3 has a boot volume of 425 litres.
Two AC synchronous electric motors drive a pair of wheels, providing all-wheel drive. The 500kg, 78kWh lithium-ion battery pack is restricted to 75kWh in the interests of longevity.
At 2,123kg, it’s over a quarter of a ton heavier than the equivalent Tesla Model 3, which Polestar puts down to the increased crash safety and stiffness in the bodyshell.
Most of the test cars had the £5,000 Performance Pack, which consists of 20-inch diameter alloy wheels and 245/40 tyres, four-piston Brembo front disc brakes in yellow (the seatbelts are similarly hued) and lower suspension with manually adjustable dampers.
The quoted range is 292 miles, but our drive showed that it wouldn’t be difficult to get that below 200 miles. Charging times are 40 minutes for an 80 per cent fill on a DC charger, though it will take much longer than that on a home wall box, which is how most folk are likely to plug in.
For those not used to it, the heady rush when you floor the throttle of one of these super electric saloons is intoxicating, not to mention nauseous for