PILOTING POLESTAR 3 IN THE ARCTIC CHANNELS THE INNER RALLY DRIVER
There are many magical and wondrous things to be found in the Arctic Circle, and a few puzzling ones too. I came across one of the latter this week in northern Sweden in the form of empty green garbage bags tied to occasional highway poles that are used by snowplows to tell where the side of the road is. Left by roadside litter-conscious citizens? Used to determine if the winds are picking up? Blown trash that simply got hung up on the poles? Nope. They indicate where a recent herd of reindeer crossed the highway. Never would have guessed that in a million years.
I discovered this fascinating, albeit arcane, fact this week while way up in Lapland — the northernmost province in Sweden — to unravel another sort of mystery. Just what is Polestar learning from winter testing their newest all-electric vehicle, the Polestar 3, on frozen Jokkmokk lake? Unlike the low-tech reindeer warning system, I was pretty sure my initial guess of trying to determine how the luxury sport SUV's electrical system, particularly the battery pack, held up to sub-zero temperatures was spot on. Nope. Turns out it's all about chassis tuning.
WHY WINTER TEST?
If you haven't been paying attention, the `P' in Polestar stands for performance, and has since the debut of the 2019 Polestar 1, a six-figure, very limited-edition plug-in hybrid that set the course for the new brand's design language and for its commitment to making great handling and exciting-to-drive vehicles. The next model up, the 2020 Polestar 2, debuted the all-electric ethos that will guide the company's future. Which brings us to the present day and the 2024 Polestar 3, the first SUV in the lineup and one that leans heavily into that capital-P performance mantra. And in turn which brings us back to Jokkmokk lake, and to Polestar's chief chassis engineer Joakim Rydholm, who, when asked why spend hundreds of hours throwing Polestar 3s into drifts and slides on frozen water, says simply, “Driving on ice, everything slows down.”
So, for those obsessed with driving dynamics — and it takes only a minute of conversation with the affable Rydholm to realize he is — pushing a vehicle to its limits on an ice track provides real-time feedback that's impossible to get on an asphalt track.
Because things “slow down,” Rydholm, who is also an accomplished rally driver, can process exactly what is happening at any given second and how the vehicle's chassis is responding. And so, he and his merry band of engineers have spent the better part of a month pushing pre-production, dual motor (or all-wheel drive) Polestar 3s to their limits on near-metre thick ice. And they've learned a lot about how to tune the perfect rotation into the sport utility vehicle.
TORQUE VECTORING
First and foremost, they've confirmed what they expected: The unabashed star of the chassis is the Torque Vectoring Dual Clutch, or TVDC. An evolution from the Polestar 1's drivetrain and developed in partnership with BorgWarner, the TVDC differs from typical torque vectoring systems in that instead of having a motor attached to each rear wheel, it has just one motor whose power is split between each wheel via a double clutch.
And instead of just slowing down the inside wheel to correct the vehicle's rotation in a slide or drift, the TVDC has been finetuned to speed up the outside wheel. This not only makes for a smaller physical unit, but more importantly translates to quick and precise handling so that even a novice ice driver — this was my first time experiencing the so-called `big ice' track — can quickly and confidently channel their inner Sebastien Loeb.
It didn't take long for me to discover, as in just the second corner of my first lap on the tight track on Jokkmokk lake, that I felt the heavy SUV rotate into the perfect position to get on the accelerator and out of the corner. Getting back to that “slow motion” philosophy, I've never felt anything near that kind of rotation on an asphalt track in a car driven in anger. Other tuning magic includes developing a power bias toward the rear, tweaking the dual-chamber air suspension to adapt quickly and seamlessly between comfort and dynamic suspension, and engineering electronically the active damper velocity to once every two milliseconds. The Polestar 3 shares the same centre of gravity as the Polestar 1, which is remarkable considering it is a premium, luxury SUV with a huge cabin that can easily fit five adults and luggage.
DRIVING ON ICE
Once I overcame the glee of being able to drift the Polestar 3 with confidence, and avoiding the drifts, I got to the serious — OK, wildly fun — business over the next few hours of turning on and turning off all the driving modes — regen braking, traction control, ride height, steering feel, suspension settings — to see if I could feel what was happening. Turns out that “ice slows things down” is bang on, as every time I changed things up, I quickly felt the change in real time, often in the next corner. The most remarkable thing, apart from how much I enjoyed the one-pedal drive regen over the mildest mode when driving the fast track, was the precise control I had over the Polestar 3 with traction control turned off. Yes, there was more tail-happy moments, but that oh-so-clever torque vectoring system in milliseconds corrected things back there, and once I discovered that I could stab the right-hand pedal much sooner than I intuitively felt initially, I was experiencing that euphoric feeling of “putting corners together,” which is the holy grail of rallying.
But surely, Joakim, the cold weather must have some other benefits for testing other than turning water into a solid surface?
The engineer shrugs, smiles and admits, “If it works in minus 30 degrees, it works everywhere.”