Volvo’s premium brand, Polestar, launched with a car that made no sense. The Polestar 1 — so called as it’s the first model it’s made — looks like a concept car, with a sensible saloon style merged seamlessly with supercar presence. It was helped by having, on paper, some proper performance to back it up, thanks to the 2.0-litre petrol engine and a trio of electric motors, delivering a total of 609hp when working together.
They’re rare, too. Polestar built just 1,500 of them, and not just because you needed to hand over £139,000. If you missed out, there’ll be no second chance.
Which is a shame, as it’s a lovely piece of kit. Polestar has kept hold of one in the UK, handing CALIBRE the keys on a miserable, damp, cold winter’s day. It’s hardly the weather for taking a six-figure supercar out on the roads for fun. Still, we’ve driven bigger, faster, and more powerful cars in the UK, and this future-facing supercar has all-wheel drive and Volvo’s legendary reputation for safety behind it. We’ll be fine.
Stepping inside — through the left-hand door, as no right-hand drive models were made — you’re presented with a pretty conventional cabin. It’s clearly borrowed a lot from Volvo, with little more than a smattering of carbon fibre and some brightly coloured seat belts suggesting the car might be something more potent than, say, a Volvo V60. The V60, incidentally, is barely a third of the cost of the Polestar, so if you feel a little hard done by when comparing your six-figure Polestar 1, you might be justified.
It’s a four-seater, officially, but placing anybody over the age of five in the rear would be considered cruel and unusual punishment. Anyone under five would need a child seat, and physics doesn’t seemingly allow one to fit. I’m sure somebody’s managed it, but this is not a practical car.
That’s clear when you look at the boot, but doing so hints at what’s to come. Where there should be space for suitcases and bags, there’s a small cubby hole and a window showing lots of high-voltage cabling going off to various parts of the car.
Fire up the engine (and all three electric motors), and the car rockets off the line but on public roads, once you’re cruising, there’s little else going on. It’s quiet, refined, and very, well, Volvo-like. It’ll reach illegal speeds on electric power alone but gets there more quickly in Power mode, which unleashes all 609hp. The 0-62mph dash is then dealt with in 4.2 seconds, which is pretty quick for a 2.5-tonne coupe. It’s a delightfully balanced powertrain, never feeling like you’ve got too much engine or too much electricity. Digital wizardry keeps everything in shape, even when you think physics will intervene. It’s not razor-sharp, but it never, ever, feels like it’s going to do something lairy.
You could probably arrange for that, though. The suspension is adjustable, but not in a Comfort-Normal-Sport switch way you might find on a BMW or even Porsche. No, the Polestar 1 has manually adjustable dampers with 22 different settings for each wheel. They’re set roughly in the middle from the factory, as you might expect, but you can fiddle to your heart’s content to make each corner softer or firmer. Softer might be an idea, as the Polestar is a little firmly sprung.
But the reality is, after you have played with the dampers once or twice, you’ll never touch them again. Your friends will also stop listening to you talking about the carbon bracing that stiffens the chassis, the T-shaped battery pack shaped for weight distribution, the carbon bodywork, or even the design nods towards the classic Volvo P1800 of the 1960s.
When they do, you’ll be left with an oddity, but one that’s worth hanging on to. It’s not a proper sports car to attack country roads with, or a plush GT car to cruise to Monaco in, but something that dips a toe into many bodies of water. It’s an interesting car, even for non-car people, and one that deserves a lot of attention.
With only 1,500 on the road globally, it’s sure to attract that attention, too, where it stands as a marker for what Polestar will become. Its second car, the cunningly named Polestar 2, is an all-electric family saloon that shows the legacy manufacturers how it should be done, while the forthcoming Polestar 3 will be an electric luxury SUV to rival the BMW iX.
But this, the Polestar 1, is where it all started. Remember it.
