After Polestar’s limited-run, debutant 1
comes, logically, the 2 – its mass-market, make or break EV. We drive a pre-production car
17 February 2020
Hällered proving ground sits an hour’s drive
east of Gothenburg and seems an exemplary place to experience a Polestar 2 for the very first time.
Sets of quiet, remote test tracks wind among
the forest and chime with the car’s environmental brief. Unlike the plug-in hybrid
Polestar 1, the 2 is entirely electric, with a WLTP
range of 311 miles and nothing less than the Tesla Model 3 in its sights.
This place also has space enough to properly
exploit the performance on offer. Which is lucky because, with a dedicated
electric motor for each axle, the 2 makes 487lb ft – more even than the Nissan GT-R – and does so almost instantly.
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But
Hällered also feels an odd place to become better acquainted with the 2, which
at £49,900 will cut the cost of entry to the Polestar owners club by almost
two-thirds and will exist as a big-volume model next to the hand-built,
1500-off £139,000 Polestar 1 grand tourer.
These
smaller cars will be assembled in the Luqiao facility of Polestar parent
company Geely in China and the battery modules are from LG Chem in South Korea.
Siemens in Germany builds the motors and the brand recently opened a 120-strong
R&D facility in Coventry. It’s an amazingly global product whose muscularly
attractive design will ensure that it draws eyeballs and graces the streets in
fashionable places around the world. Yet here we are, standing in the Swedish
bush.
But
this is where the magic happens. “The first thing the driver gets from the
chassis is how the steering feels,” says Joakim Rydholm, the lead chassis
engineer and someone not only with a clear mission sense but also softly voiced
but nevertheless Italianate levels of passion. “Then the rest of the suspension
should work in harmony with the steering,” he says, revealing that the chassis
is set up for slight oversteer. He says the manually adjustable Ohlins dampers
alone were iterated through 120 different tunes, with removal and hardware
changes required each time: “There are no shortcuts: it’s hard work behind the
steering wheel to get a good car. The human is sensitive and you cannot calculate that.”
All of which should be music to our ears
because, as always, it comes down to priorities. Polestar will not operate
dealerships but chic ‘spaces’; the cars can be ordered online only; it will
make a splash among the general public, with cutting-edge looks and
zero-emission powertrains; and it is a subsidiary of a marque that recently announced an
intention to limit its cars to 112mph and, bluntly, has never given us a
world-class driver’s car. It would have been so very easy for driver appeal to
descend so far down the 2 to-do list as to become irrelevant, but that has not
at all been the case.
No
point beating around the bush: the Polestar 2 is good to drive. It may never
set your synapses on fire but the natural steering response is well matched to
what the suspension is doing, and on Hällered’s quick, flowing handling course,
the Ohlins dampers – hydraulically textured in their movements – only ever need
one bite of the cherry to get the body under control.
Given the powertrain layout, it is no
surprise that the car’s balance is good and one can’t fail to notice how high
the limits of grip are compared with, say, an XC40. It can be teased into neatly rotating on
the brakes, but snow and ice are required to get the car expressing itself
under power.
On
the more challenging rough-road tracks (there are surfaces resembling LA
freeways and Perthshire B-roads), the ride is on the firm side but remains
genuinely compliant. Gut feel says this car ought to cope well with UK
surfaces, although the softer setup of non-Performance Pack versions might be
best for daily driving.
We
know the 2 sits on the same CMA platform as the XC40, but it also features a
unique front subframe for crash protection (combustion engines being more
absorbent than electric motors), has modifications at the rear and supports a
battery whose shape leaves good rear footwell space, which is rare in an
electric car.
In
fact, barring the small boot and poor rearward visibility, the 2’s cabin is
superbly conceived. Where the Model 3 goes for an expansive, minimalist
ambience, this is more classically enveloping. The window line is high and the
glasshouse vaguely pillbox, and the standard panoramic roof is a game-changer
because, without it, the high ‘transmission’ tunnel, abrupt 11.0in display and
blade-shaped dashboard might have made the place feel too confined. As it is,
the cockpit feels safe, secure and involving, and even in this early-stage
verification prototype, the fabric and wood trims hit high notes for perceived
quality. Soft but supportive seats – a modern Volvo speciality – complete the
surprisingly lavish picture.
Back
with the not-so-oily bits, Olle Fast (powertrain expert, naturally) explains
that the torque split is variable between 60:40 and 40:60 and Rydholm adds that
steering angle is used to inform the split and help the car rotate. Drive
smoothly and it looks for grip; get punchy and it will begin to favour the
rear. Fast also says that for more power, they’d need a better-flowing battery
rather than stronger motors, although so rapid is the pace of development that
improvements are being made “more or less on a daily basis”. For now, it’s
402bhp whether or not you go for the Performance Pack, which brings 20in wheels
with Continental SportContact 6 tyres, the Ohlins dampers and gold-calipered
Brembo brakes.
For
an electric mass-market family car, the Performance Pack is overkill. And, in
truth, so is the surging performance of the 2. But there’s appeal in the way
this machine concurrently feels both highly rational and slightly illogical,
and at a time when so many automotive pleasures come with guilt attached,
that’s exciting. That the people behind this electric car are what we might
still describe as ‘petrolheads’ is even more so.
Source: Autocar.
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