Drive report: Living with the Polestar 3
After being impressed by how the Polestar 3 drove during a trip to Northumberland, we’ve been finding out what it’s like to live with
Polestar is a brand that I’ve always been a big fan of. I love the way they bring top-level luxury and ferocious performance while still managing to maintain a degree of understatedness. The Swedish company really does make cars that offer a little bit of everything and this was certainly the case when I drove the updated Polestar 3 earlier in the year.
On that occasion, I was lucky enough to spend the day bombing around some truly breathtaking roads in Northumberland and even a trip off the beaten track (which resulted in me needing a tow out of a ditch) couldn’t take the edge off what was a genuinely outstanding car to drive.
On that day in the North of England, I drove both the Performance and Dual Motor versions of the 3 but, partly because of the little escapade off-road, I did not get a chance to test out the baby of the range – the Rear Motor model. I was therefore thrilled when I was offered the chance to spend a week living with one back in June.
While not as powerful as the two versions of the 3 I had previously driven, I was still excited to see what the car was like to live with every day. Could it continue to impress me over a longer period of time, or would the week-long test show up issues that a single day could not uncover?
Well, let’s start with the positives. First off, the drive remains absolutely brilliant. It may not be as fast as its more powerful siblings, the rear motor still produces a very chunky 333bhp. That means the car is definitely no slouch and you can’t help but be impressed by its acceleration, which is pretty much instantaneous. On motorways, the 3 is smooth, fast and supremely comfortable, while around town, things calm down and it becomes a quiet and fairly economical family SUV.
The car arrived with a full charge, with the on-board computer telling me to expect around 260 miles of range. While this is well short of the official claimed range of 375 miles, the car did remain pretty true to its original estimation – and that included a drive into the dreaded stop-start traffic in and around London!
Inside, the interior feels genuinely premium with lashings of leather and other high-quality materials. The centrepiece of the cabin is the 14.5-inch touchscreen, which is responsive and easy to use, while the stereo system – complete with Dolby Atmos and Abbey Road Studios Audio – is a genuine joy to behold. My week with the Polestar coincided with England playing New Zealand in a test match and cricket on the radio has honestly never sounded so good, even as England threw away wickets like Oprah dishing out freebies (RIP Bazball).
While all this is great, there were a few issues and things started to rear their ugly heads pretty much as soon as I took delivery of the car. On the very first night, I was awoken in the wee small hours by the piercing wail of a car alarm. It was only after much swearing about my inconsiderate neighbours that I realised that I was the resident keeping everyone up! The alarm was a pretty consistent problem as the week dragged on, too.
While the noisy wake-up call was by far the worst occurrence, I came back to many a car park to find the car’s lights flashing menacingly, even if the sound was mercifully missing. The only way around this is to turn down the alarm’s sensitivity, which means wading through the menus. While this is not an issue in itself, the system resets every time you step away from the car, meaning you have to do it at the end of every journey – something I inevitably forgot to do on more than one occasion.
And this goes to the heart of the 3’s biggest issue. In Polestar’s quest for simplicity and minimalism, they have invented a raft of problems that never existed in the first place. Everything (and I mean everything) is operated through the central screen. There’s not even a manual button to open the glovebox – you have to go through the computer. It’s infuriating! I get wanting to be safe, but why is there an alarm setting so sensitive that you can’t even leave the car in a supermarket carpark for ten minutes without it lighting up like a Christmas tree? And why, once I’ve turned it off, do I have to do so after every trip?