The Polestar One: A Technical Marvel with a Soul

I'm getting both the internal combustion engine and the electric motors, and well, it's quite quick so you get the instant torque when you put your foot down and the thing just takes off. It's quick and I'm not going to pretend it sounds as good as a V8 or a v12 but it sounds different and it sounds good. It's a different kind of noise, an interesting noise that reassures me that this isn't some sort of aloof high-tech machine, it's one that appeals to drivers. It's a fascinating engineer's car and I really like it. You can revel in all the different things that are happening and they're seamlessly integrated so you don't really feel the petrol engine or the electric motors shuffling the various amounts of torque between themselves.

The Polestar One does do a good job of disguising its mess, but under certain conditions, it's not as subtle. In the way it goes around corners, now we've got double wishbone suspension at the front and multi-link axle at the back. Interestingly, the adaptive dampers Volvo's adaptive dampers have been thrown in the bin and instead, we've got some very expensive Öhlins dual valve dampers which are also adjustable but you do have to have a spanner and about half an hour underneath the car to adjust them. This is both strange, as you can't imagine getting out in there with your best suit and grovelling around under the car, but it's also really cool.

The guys at Polestar were saying their Volvo colleagues consider this car to be way too firm. A Volvo is much softer they say, but actually, it rides in many respects better than a Volvo. Yes, there's some firmness there, but it rounds off all the edges, there's a plushness and an expensive feeling to those dampers over these sort of broken Italian roads we get some thud and the occasional crash over really nasty stuff but the rest of the time you're not distracted by the ride. It does a really good job, but it's in the corner this thing really does its thing.

Now, there's not a great deal of feedback from the steering, but it is very progressive. It's nicely weighted and so you could just place the car where you want it and then you just turn in and it grips and it goes. It's an eerie feeling because the electronics are so well-calibrated that you feel it working but it's not intrusive. There's no way a car this big and heavy should be able to go through corners like this. I mean, it's not perfect, out of some slow stuff if you really gun the throttle there's a little smidge of torque steer fight as the internal combustion engine tries to put down the power at the same time as the rear motors.

But once you get some load through them and you're trying a bit harder then nicely progressive this thing will cover ground at an astounding rate. And despite all the technology going on underneath it, it feels analog. You know it's not razor sharp, it's not full of feedback but it is an entertaining thing and it does stuff that you just think a car this big and this heavy shouldn't be able to do. And of course, because it's four-wheel drive, you can really throw it around even on these slightly greasy roads.

As I spend more time in the Polestar One, the more I like it and the more I think it might not be so bad. The future after all, there are interesting cars coming and this sort of sets the tone. Maybe the floor makes this car so interesting but that's what makes it special.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enright so before we discuss how the Polestar one drives it's probably worth revisiting what it is because there's lots of interesting things going on with this car it's a really really fascinating piece of kit so I mean just start with the looks now it's basically the Volvo concept coupe a or coupe a concept made real and if you're unkind you say it looks a bit like a two-door cut and shut Volvo s90 but sit in the seat in the flesh and it looks so much better than that this is a seriously good looking car and it's good looking because it does the coupe a GT thing differently to everyone else I mean we're in Italy and they like their cars in Italy and everywhere we're driving this thing it's like guppy fish your feeding time people are slack-jawed they almost walk into lamppost trying to get a look at it it looks really really really good I think now it's more to the Polestar one the way it looks because the bodywork is interesting in itself so instead of normal sheet metal or aluminium it's made of carbon fiber reinforced plastic the same stuff that BMW uses for bits of the i3 and bits of the i8 and it's a lightweight material which allows Volvo to get the weight of this car down to and I say down to with a little bit of a caveat down to two thousand three hundred and fifty kilo now that's still quite heavy but when you consider what's going on underneath this car you'll understand that actually that's a pretty good figure so mechanically why is it so heavy even with such a lot of lightweight carbon fiber reinforced panels well so this is a plug-in electric hybrid so we've got internal combustion and electric motors plus a battery that runs down the transmission tunnel and across the rear underneath and at the back we've got two electric motors one for each wheel so this has proper active torque vectoring so those two motors combined put out about just over 200 horsepower there's a third motor which is effectively a powerful starter generator which sits between the internal combustion engine and the gearbox which drives the front wheels and that's putting out somewhere around 100 horsepower then you've got the internal combustion unit itself which is from the t8 series so it's a 2 litre and it's got a turbocharger and a supercharger and that it's cool because they lancia delta s4 has a turbocharger and a supercharger and that's a really cool car and they've also added a carbon fiber plenum induction for this car which is even cooler now the total output internal combustion engine electric motors is just over 600 brake horsepower which is quite a lot but it's not as much as the talk which is seven hundred and thirty-eight pounds foot of torque and because a lot of that comes from the electric motors it's instant torque so this thing is quite quick but before we get to that what else have we got to look at well inside it's even more Volvo but do you know what it gets away with it because the S 90 is based on has got a pretty cool interior it's kind of that minimalist it's all generated off the touchscreen there's lots of cool Scandinavian materials that you don't normally see in cars I mean here it's your standard carbon fiber but they put special leather on the seats the stitching yellow seatbelts and it works this car costs a hundred and thirty-nine thousand pounds which is quite a lot but you don't feel like you're shortchanged yes as a 2+2 the rear seats are a bit cramped but that's not why you buy this car you buy it because it's a coupe a GT and you want to stand out and you want to do something different and my word this thing does things differently so let's start with the performance well it's not quite as fast as you'd expect 600 horsepower to be but then it is carting around nearly 2 tons but even with just the electric motors on so we're in pure electric mode now you get quite a lot of performance you get that instant torque it feels like a normal TV would so without you you've got just over 200 force pass so it would really and you just put your foot down off it goes it's really it's our electric cars they just do that thing it's you don't tire initially of that instant torque that instant surge now you can do up to 100 miles an hour just in pure electric mode and it will do it for about 80 miles which is further than the most plug-in electrics will go which is which is quite cool I've said cool quite a lot haven't I damn damn saying cool so we've got our various driver modes now the electric motors we've discussed that's the one that gives you a to 80 miles just the rear wheels driving $200 horsepower we've also got if we go on our drive mode selector here we've got hybrid which mixes internal combustion and the electric it decides when and where it's going to do that we've also got individual where you can mix and match and importantly we've got power at that according to this graphic here is for sporty driving so let's put it in power now with power we're getting both the internal combustion engine and the electric motors and well it's quite quick so you get the instant torque you put your foot down and the thing just takes off it's quick and I'm not going to pretend it sounds as good as a VA or a v12 but it sounds different and it sounds good it's a different kind of noise an interesting noise so you've got you've got that carbon fiber plenum so you get the intake noise from that you get the whine of the supercharger you get a faint whistle from the turbocharger then you get the electric motor spooling up and there's a a different kind of wine from the planetary gears doing their things it's a really fascinating kind of Orchestra of noise it's a technical noise it's a mechanical noise it reassures you that this isn't some sort of aloof high-tech machine it's one that appeals to drivers it's a fascinating engineers car and I really like it you can you can revel it all the different things that are happening and they're seamlessly integrated so you don't really feel the petrol engine or the electric motors shuffling the various amounts of talk between themselves that bit of it the electronic brain does that brilliantly but the noises are there to let you know what's going on and that that's really fascinating now where the Polestar one does do a good job of disguising its mess it's in the way it goes around corners now we've got double wishbone suspension at the front multi-link axle at the back interestingly the adaptive dampers Volvo's adaptive dampers they've been thrown in the bin and instead we've got some very expensive olan's dual valve dampers which are also adjustable but you do have to have a spanner and about half an hour underneath the car to adjust them which is both strange 139 thousand pounds sports coupe a you can't imagine getting out in there there best suit and grovelling around under the car but it's also I'm gonna use that word again it's really cool it's such a geeky barroom fact to tell people oh yeah I've got a spanner and I have to adjust my dampers like that maybe that's just me now they're in their sort of mid setting at the moment and in fairness they do quite they do a good job now the guys at pole star was saying their Volvo colleagues consider this car to be way too firm a Volvo is much softer they say but actually it rides in many respects better than a Volvo yes there's some firmness there but it rounds off all the edges there's a plushness and expensive feeling to those dampers over these sort of broken Italian roads we get some thud and the occasional crash over really nasty stuff but the rest of the time you're not distracted by the ride it does a really good job but it's in the corner this thing really does its thing now there's not a great deal of feedback from the steering but it is very progressive it's nicely weighted and so you could just place the car where you want it and then you just turn in and it grips and it goes it's an eerie feeling because the electronics are so well calibrated that you feel it working but it's not intrusive there's no way a car this big and heavy should be able to go through corners like this I mean it's not perfect out of some slow stuff if you really gun the throttle there's a little smidge of torque steer fight as the internal combustion engine tries to put down the power at the same time as the rear motors but other than that even the brakes there are bits nachi at low speed as the regen and the friction sort of fight to decide who's going to slow the car but once you get some load through them and you're trying a bit harder then nicely progressive this thing will cover ground at an astounding rate and despite all the technology going on underneath it feels analog you know it's not it's not razor sharp it's not full of feedback but it is an entertaining thing and it does stuff that you just think a car this big and this heavy shouldn't be able to do and of course because it's four-wheel drive you can really throw it around even on these slightly greasy roads I'm really enjoying this it's a really clever piece of kit and yep it'll do the other thing as well you can just slow down dial it all back put it back in pure electric which I'm going to do now and it's silent and it's smooth and you trickle through villages and towns it has character this car and maybe the floors are what make it so interesting but the more time I spend in it the more I like it and the more I think it might not be so bad the future after all there are interesting cars coming and this sort of sets the tone yeah I like this carright so before we discuss how the Polestar one drives it's probably worth revisiting what it is because there's lots of interesting things going on with this car it's a really really fascinating piece of kit so I mean just start with the looks now it's basically the Volvo concept coupe a or coupe a concept made real and if you're unkind you say it looks a bit like a two-door cut and shut Volvo s90 but sit in the seat in the flesh and it looks so much better than that this is a seriously good looking car and it's good looking because it does the coupe a GT thing differently to everyone else I mean we're in Italy and they like their cars in Italy and everywhere we're driving this thing it's like guppy fish your feeding time people are slack-jawed they almost walk into lamppost trying to get a look at it it looks really really really good I think now it's more to the Polestar one the way it looks because the bodywork is interesting in itself so instead of normal sheet metal or aluminium it's made of carbon fiber reinforced plastic the same stuff that BMW uses for bits of the i3 and bits of the i8 and it's a lightweight material which allows Volvo to get the weight of this car down to and I say down to with a little bit of a caveat down to two thousand three hundred and fifty kilo now that's still quite heavy but when you consider what's going on underneath this car you'll understand that actually that's a pretty good figure so mechanically why is it so heavy even with such a lot of lightweight carbon fiber reinforced panels well so this is a plug-in electric hybrid so we've got internal combustion and electric motors plus a battery that runs down the transmission tunnel and across the rear underneath and at the back we've got two electric motors one for each wheel so this has proper active torque vectoring so those two motors combined put out about just over 200 horsepower there's a third motor which is effectively a powerful starter generator which sits between the internal combustion engine and the gearbox which drives the front wheels and that's putting out somewhere around 100 horsepower then you've got the internal combustion unit itself which is from the t8 series so it's a 2 litre and it's got a turbocharger and a supercharger and that it's cool because they lancia delta s4 has a turbocharger and a supercharger and that's a really cool car and they've also added a carbon fiber plenum induction for this car which is even cooler now the total output internal combustion engine electric motors is just over 600 brake horsepower which is quite a lot but it's not as much as the talk which is seven hundred and thirty-eight pounds foot of torque and because a lot of that comes from the electric motors it's instant torque so this thing is quite quick but before we get to that what else have we got to look at well inside it's even more Volvo but do you know what it gets away with it because the S 90 is based on has got a pretty cool interior it's kind of that minimalist it's all generated off the touchscreen there's lots of cool Scandinavian materials that you don't normally see in cars I mean here it's your standard carbon fiber but they put special leather on the seats the stitching yellow seatbelts and it works this car costs a hundred and thirty-nine thousand pounds which is quite a lot but you don't feel like you're shortchanged yes as a 2+2 the rear seats are a bit cramped but that's not why you buy this car you buy it because it's a coupe a GT and you want to stand out and you want to do something different and my word this thing does things differently so let's start with the performance well it's not quite as fast as you'd expect 600 horsepower to be but then it is carting around nearly 2 tons but even with just the electric motors on so we're in pure electric mode now you get quite a lot of performance you get that instant torque it feels like a normal TV would so without you you've got just over 200 force pass so it would really and you just put your foot down off it goes it's really it's our electric cars they just do that thing it's you don't tire initially of that instant torque that instant surge now you can do up to 100 miles an hour just in pure electric mode and it will do it for about 80 miles which is further than the most plug-in electrics will go which is which is quite cool I've said cool quite a lot haven't I damn damn saying cool so we've got our various driver modes now the electric motors we've discussed that's the one that gives you a to 80 miles just the rear wheels driving $200 horsepower we've also got if we go on our drive mode selector here we've got hybrid which mixes internal combustion and the electric it decides when and where it's going to do that we've also got individual where you can mix and match and importantly we've got power at that according to this graphic here is for sporty driving so let's put it in power now with power we're getting both the internal combustion engine and the electric motors and well it's quite quick so you get the instant torque you put your foot down and the thing just takes off it's quick and I'm not going to pretend it sounds as good as a VA or a v12 but it sounds different and it sounds good it's a different kind of noise an interesting noise so you've got you've got that carbon fiber plenum so you get the intake noise from that you get the whine of the supercharger you get a faint whistle from the turbocharger then you get the electric motor spooling up and there's a a different kind of wine from the planetary gears doing their things it's a really fascinating kind of Orchestra of noise it's a technical noise it's a mechanical noise it reassures you that this isn't some sort of aloof high-tech machine it's one that appeals to drivers it's a fascinating engineers car and I really like it you can you can revel it all the different things that are happening and they're seamlessly integrated so you don't really feel the petrol engine or the electric motors shuffling the various amounts of talk between themselves that bit of it the electronic brain does that brilliantly but the noises are there to let you know what's going on and that that's really fascinating now where the Polestar one does do a good job of disguising its mess it's in the way it goes around corners now we've got double wishbone suspension at the front multi-link axle at the back interestingly the adaptive dampers Volvo's adaptive dampers they've been thrown in the bin and instead we've got some very expensive olan's dual valve dampers which are also adjustable but you do have to have a spanner and about half an hour underneath the car to adjust them which is both strange 139 thousand pounds sports coupe a you can't imagine getting out in there there best suit and grovelling around under the car but it's also I'm gonna use that word again it's really cool it's such a geeky barroom fact to tell people oh yeah I've got a spanner and I have to adjust my dampers like that maybe that's just me now they're in their sort of mid setting at the moment and in fairness they do quite they do a good job now the guys at pole star was saying their Volvo colleagues consider this car to be way too firm a Volvo is much softer they say but actually it rides in many respects better than a Volvo yes there's some firmness there but it rounds off all the edges there's a plushness and expensive feeling to those dampers over these sort of broken Italian roads we get some thud and the occasional crash over really nasty stuff but the rest of the time you're not distracted by the ride it does a really good job but it's in the corner this thing really does its thing now there's not a great deal of feedback from the steering but it is very progressive it's nicely weighted and so you could just place the car where you want it and then you just turn in and it grips and it goes it's an eerie feeling because the electronics are so well calibrated that you feel it working but it's not intrusive there's no way a car this big and heavy should be able to go through corners like this I mean it's not perfect out of some slow stuff if you really gun the throttle there's a little smidge of torque steer fight as the internal combustion engine tries to put down the power at the same time as the rear motors but other than that even the brakes there are bits nachi at low speed as the regen and the friction sort of fight to decide who's going to slow the car but once you get some load through them and you're trying a bit harder then nicely progressive this thing will cover ground at an astounding rate and despite all the technology going on underneath it feels analog you know it's not it's not razor sharp it's not full of feedback but it is an entertaining thing and it does stuff that you just think a car this big and this heavy shouldn't be able to do and of course because it's four-wheel drive you can really throw it around even on these slightly greasy roads I'm really enjoying this it's a really clever piece of kit and yep it'll do the other thing as well you can just slow down dial it all back put it back in pure electric which I'm going to do now and it's silent and it's smooth and you trickle through villages and towns it has character this car and maybe the floors are what make it so interesting but the more time I spend in it the more I like it and the more I think it might not be so bad the future after all there are interesting cars coming and this sort of sets the tone yeah I like this car\n"