Goodwood Test: 2021 Polestar 1 Review

If you’re a keen follower of Goodwood Road & Racing you’ll likely have heard the Polestar name and about this, the Polestar 1. But you might not know much about the Polestar brand or where it’s going, and both are important. So let’s begin with the backstory.

Polestar used to be a very successful racing team, having campaigned Volvos in the Swedish Touring Car Championship from the late 1990s. The team’s antics hadn’t gone unnoticed by Volvo, and by the late 2000s Volvo came knocking in need of some performance expertise. The pairing birthed first the Volvo C30 Polestar Concept in 2009 and then the S60 Polestar Concept in 2012, both entirely unhinged versions of the original cars with performance and appeal that had been missing from Volvo’s range. Sadly those cars never made it to production, but come 2015 Volvo bought Polestar, and thereafter started to introduce sporty ‘Polestar Engineered’ versions of its cars. The race team, meanwhile, became known as Cyan Racing.

The direction really changed in 2017, though, when Volvo announced that Polestar would stand on its own two feet as a performance electric car brand. The company’s first creation, with money flowing in from the overarching parent company Geely, is the car you see here, the Polestar 1. It is not fully electric, which is understandably confusing given it is a performance electric brand, but it is the statement car, the machine to get people interested in the company and to appreciate just how clever its engineering boffins are.

There are no two ways about it: the Polestar 1 is gorgeous. Of course there are immediate similarities between the Polestar 1 and many current Volvos, a detail like the Thor’s Hammer headlights for example. But the reason for that is this car’s design can be traced back to the Volvo Concept Coupe from 2013, which itself inspired the looks of the current Volvo range.

If you ignore the Volvo connection for a moment, though, and just focus on the object in hand, it is a lovely creation. It is silky smooth, with a wide, bold stance and yet very little in the way of fussy detail. The three-quarter view, from either the front or the rear, is just spot on. One detail I particularly like is the bonnet, the shut lines of which cut around the headlights and across the top of the front wheel.  What’s more, the whole body is made from carbon-fibre. There’s even a diddy concealed rear spoiler that rises up out of the car’s rear at 62mph, or manually if you so choose.

It is one of the best cars to drive if you enjoy seeing others double take. Some will never notice it, as they might not for any car, however rare or flashy. But some will know what it is and give it a good look, and the rest will do an amusing routine of look, look away, look back with a confused expression.

Now to the juicy tech. The Polestar 1 is one of the most technically interesting cars I have ever driven, not just because it’s a performance hybrid and they tend to be rather complicated, but also because the powertrain is just so unusual.

Under that lovely bonnet lies a 2.0-litre, four-cylinder petrol engine that is both turbocharged and supercharged. Backing that up are two 85kW electric motors and a crank-integrated starter generator motor, with the batteries nestled between the two front seats and behind the rears for a total capacity of 34kWh. All in all you have 609PS (448kW) and 1,000Nm (740Nm) of torque, and you can plug the car in at home or at a charging point.

The performance is impressive, given the car’s weight of 2,350kg. Zero to 62mph takes 4.2 seconds, the top speed is 145mph, there’s an electric-only range of 77 miles and the electric-only top speed is limited to 99mph. See why this is a bit of an attention grabber? On top of that there’s torque vectoring, 22-way adjustable Öhlins Dual Flow Valve dampers, double wishbones and 400mm Akebono discs at the front, and a multilink set-up and 390mm discs at the back. All Polestar 1s are left-hand-drive.

To drive it is a curious machine. You start the car in hybrid mode, the default of five (the others being AWD, Pure, Power and Individual), and in most cases you’ll be greeted by no noise at all. When the four-cylinder engine does kick in, at idle at least it sounds not too dissimilar to a diesel, but with more revs there’s a delightful thrum unlike any other four-cylinder motor around – it is closer in sound to a three- or even a two-cylinder engine. What’s more, with anything more than half throttle there’s a subtle whine from the supercharger.

There are the options to charge and hold charge while on the move, using the engine to top up the battery should you know you want a certain range for a part of your journey or want to maintain what power there already is. And when you do decide to cruise around sans-petrol the car is as serene and relaxing as you’d hope it to be. The performance in electric-only Pure mode isn’t bad either, with a linear pull from the motors that feels like it could tow you well beyond the 99mph EV top speed. The 77-mile EV range is achievable, too.

With the engine and motors working together is where the Polestar 1 really wakes up. In the dry the whole car just sits up and takes off, pulling through the eight-speed gearbox quickly and efficiently with no let-up whatsoever, that thrummy four-pot singing happily to 6,000rpm.

I didn’t find it necessary to use the paddles to control the gearbox, which is not to say the ‘box is bad, because it isn’t. There’s just nothing to be gained by going up and down through the gears yourself – best let the car do its own thing.

The steering communicates very little at all but you can trust it to do what you ask of it, and at higher speeds you really can feel the torque vectoring system getting to work; one of the Polestar 1’s true strengths is how well it hides its mass. The brakes pull you to a stop quickly and without drama, and those incredible dampers do a good job of ironing out imperfections in the road, a tough task with those huge 21-inch wheels.

Driving the Polestar 1 in the wet, though, highlighted perhaps how unconventional the drivetrain is. It’s not to say something like a similarly hefty Bentley Continental GT is an overly adjustable machine, but its simplicity brings a degree of predictability – try to use the throttle to adjust the Polestar 1 and you’ll likely get a small dollop of torque steer.

Climb inside the Polestar 1 and you’ll notice that pretty much everything, from the steering wheel to the engine start switch, the infotainment system and the drive mode selector, are from Volvo, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. There’s a logic and a simplicity to everything, without being pared down to the absolute minimum. There’s still a physical home button for the infotainment system, for example, which, when you’re on the move, makes getting back to the home screen that much safer as your eyes can stay fixed on the road. The transparent, illuminated gear selector, meanwhile, with the Polestar logo etched into its centre, is a thing of beauty, and there’s carbon-fibre on the dash, doors and door sills. Having such an expansive panoramic roof makes a real difference to the cabin’s feel, too, as although the Polestar 1 is a rather big machine the interior, with batteries crammed under the armrest between the two front seats and a very low roofline, isn’t spacious. The seats are lovely too, the contrasting Polestar yellow seat belts doling out a welcome burst of colour.

Does it feel like the interior of a £139,000 car? No, it does not – it feels not too dissimilar from a Volvo costing half the price. Volvo interiors are some of the nicest around, and so sitting in the Polestar 1 is still a very pleasant experience.

The Polestar 1 comes in more or less a single spec. You can choose the colour, of which there are five (a matte finish is £4,500 more), whether you want chrome or gloss black trim, which one of the three wheel designs you want, and finally whether you’d like light or dark seats.

Included as standard is a 12.3-inch digital instrument cluster, a 9-inch central infotainment screen (mounted vertically), a head-up display, a 360-degree camera, navigation, Bluetooth, a DAB radio, two USB ports, Apple CarPlay, Android Auto, a Bowers & Wilkins stereo, heated seats, a heated steering wheel, and two-zone climate control. There’s also automatic wipers, keyless entry (the key itself is disappointingly basic), adaptive cruise control, automatic, bending lights, lane-keep assist, a blind spot warning system, hill start assist and so on.

While it is a novelty, what I find childishly cool is a clear screen in the boot which lets you peer at some of the bright orange cabling that connects to the batteries. In the same way you can peer through the glass of the engine bay on a Lamborghini Huracan, you can gaze at some of the electric gubbins that make up the Polestar 1’s impressive powertrain. Everything is labelled too, although only electrical engineers are likely to know what it all means. The compromise for the battery tech, however, is a small boot.

The Polestar 1 will not be for everyone, but with only 1,500 being built for the entire world (putting it on a similar exclusivity level to the Porsche Carrera GT) it really doesn’t have to be. It looks superb, and the powertrain is incredibly intriguing. As an attention grabbing GT car to get people hooked, it does exactly what it needs to do and does so very well.