Having made an impressive standing start as a (sort of) independent carmaker, Polestar has experienced some fairly significant headwinds recently. You may have read about them. This doesn’t seem completely fair on the basis of it being a design-led company staffed by people who genuinely like cars for their own sake rather than just as a means to tediously move people about. But standing starts are always tough. And for what seems like a very long time, Polestar has only been selling the saloon-shaped 2, which was good-looking enough and decent to drive, but hardly aligned to the times in terms of offering European buyers what they wanted.
The 3 (and to a lesser extent, the new 4) are obviously intended to fix that. If we can agree that a compact-ish, pseudo-SUV appearance is what keeps most punters happy (it is), then consider the 3 ideally sized and styled. It isn’t vast inside like some battery-powered cars manage to be and perhaps the boot isn’t much to write home about - but it’ll accommodate a standard-issue family and, more importantly, look fairly sharp and not overly tall while doing it. Not so sharp that you’d step back in a car park, agog - yet it is certainly angular and interesting enough to have made the assortment of VW Group EVs my in-the-trade neighbour parked next to it look like blancmanges.
But that’s mostly by-the-by. You’re reading about the 3 again because even without the Performance Pack we drove at launch, you get 490hp in its Long Range Dual Motor configuration, which is a sufficiently large output to generate a blip on the PH radar. If that fact alone fails to raise your level of interest above that which you’d devote to paint thinners, then by all means, stop reading now - there’s nothing here to trouble anyone’s pulse in a revelatory sense. Alternatively, if you’ve decided an upmarket (but not luxury) EV might actually fit your everyday needs and are inclined to think that a very fast one would be best, then you’ve come to exactly the right place. Because, the usual caveats aside, the 3 is worth talking about.
Full disclosure - the car we borrowed did arrive with (or at least, immediately develop) a fairly significant glitch: it wouldn’t turn on. Or to put a finer point on it, it would turn on mechanically speaking and could be driven as normal, but without giving you any clue as to what was happening the inside, where its screens were as dead as Julius Caesar. Once upon a time, when electricity was present in the cabin mostly to power a tape deck, this would’ve been merely inconvenient - but, of course, in the 3 the vast main touchscreen controls virtually everything, which made the first 100 miles or so seem oddly chancy.
Turns out this just needed a hard reset to rectify, which, for future reference, is simply a matter of holding down the large ‘play’ button for 30 seconds or so, when the Google-powered system reboots like the 2.6-tonne PC it is. It was fine thereafter - although, more interestingly, it was fine for the first 90 minutes, too. By that I mean without anything to distract you (or beep at you for no good reason or steer of its own accord) the 3 drove very pleasantly indeed. Not like it was an electric touring car or attempting to be the answer to three different questions at once, but like a family-orientated fast crossover with a well-modulated ride and good refinement. If only all EVs drove so blamelessly and benignly well.
Obviously this cuts against the grain of Polestar’s marketing angle (that the 3 is an SUV ‘that drives like a sports car’) - it doesn’t, not least because the steering is about as communicative as a severed undersea cable, but also because it weighs about a metric tonne more than any sports car should. And yet there is, courtesy of dual-chamber air springs and adaptive dampers, no lack of suppleness or even fluidity. In fact, the car barely feigns sportiness - it plainly wants to be intuitive and easy to manage and just game enough to keep you interested when pushing on. Agreeably, it is all three of these things.
Naturally, it helps that the chassis is underwritten by real potency if you’re inclined to take significant bites out of your battery charge, although it’s genuinely more pleasing to find a well-measured accelerator pedal that starts at family crossover and moves progressively through hot hatch-style performance before arriving at full-on, dual-motor electric SUV. Being able to instinctively access precisely how much power you want means you spend less time hurting your neck and more appreciating the linearity and simplicity of just going very briskly on battery power. Which the 3 will do whether you’re in Range or Performance mode.
That the car is slightly more lively in its latter setting assuages some of the disappointment in the prospective distance offered by the former. In admittedly chilly conditions, the 3 was disinclined to predict more than 290 miles from an almost fully charged 107kWh battery - plenty enough to be practical, yet a very long way from the advertised 395 miles. Of course, there is a single motor variant if range is near the top of your buying criteria (on paper, it suggests 438 miles is technically doable), although, as ever, if you’re intending to do genuinely big daily commutes, we wouldn’t point you in the direction of an EV in the first place. We had to fast charge the 3 twice in one week via Ionity and paid £135 for the pleasure. At £75k, a replacement for a Defender 110 D350 it is not.
But it is that other thing: a likeable, presentable, decently equipped and very well-mannered electric car. Despite the best efforts of its German rivals, these are too few in number and it is to Polestar’s credit that the 3 is (limited-edition BST aside) both preferable to the 2 and good enough to drive in its own right to justify its place on the PH chopping block. That doesn’t mean it eludes the usual reservations about weight and cost and usability - it is merely par for the course on all three - but for once these didn’t seem like overriding concerns, or not when sitting in the car at any rate. While you’re in it, there is a good chance you’ll be perfectly happy to be there. Even with everything turned off.
SPECIFICATION | POLESTAR 3 LONG RANGE DUAL MOTOR
Engine: 400V Lithium-ion battery, 107kWh useable capacity
Transmission: 2 permanent magnet synchronous electric motors
Power (hp): 490
Torque (lb ft): 620
0-62mph: 4.8 seconds
Top speed: 130mph
Weight: 2,584kg (DIN)
MPG: 395 miles, efficiency 2.9 miles/kWh (WLTP)
CO2: 0g/km
Price: £75,900
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