Of all the new electric vehicles headed to the U.S. market in 2025, the Polestar 4 is definitely one of the ones I find the most interesting.
Like a Toro y Moi album, the Polestar 4 kind of defies genres. It's a four-door sedan, but a tall one, shared more like a coupe, but with a wagon-like rear-end. It is considerably wider, taller and longer than the familiar Polestar 2 sedan, though due to the latter's lack of many configuration options in the U.S. (thank anti-China tariffs for that) the Polestar 4 is actually cheaper. And unlike the rest of the Sino-European-American Polestar family, the Polestar 4 is built in South Korea at the Renault-Samsung factory.
Oh, and it doesn't have a rear window. At all. Cameras do the work of seeing out the back instead.
I'm not the first person to draw a comparison between Polestar (itself a spinoff of Volvo) and another Swedish car brand, the gone-but-not-forgotten Saab. But the Polestar 4's quirks come off especially kind of Saab-ish. Will that be enough to propel Polestar to the mainstream success it needs, though?
Reviewer Jack Scarlett over at the UK's Fully Charged Show gave the new Polestar 4 a go, and despite its quirks—or perhaps because of them—he thinks it has the juice. His review is worth a watch in full.
Jack didn't have the best first impressions of the car. He didn't love the proportions or the overall design vibes, which he doesn't think fit well with the rest of the Polestar line. He also didn't appreciate the automatic pre-warming functions in colder weather, although I can't say I'd mind that myself. The lack of physical controls is frustrating, he said, especially for things that should have them, like window functions.
But on the road, it's a different story. "I think this might be one of the finest long-distance point-to-point vehicles that I've ever had the pleasure of driving," Jack said. "I must've done 300-odd miles in the last 24 hours and it's just eaten them up." Road manners are outstanding and the performance is "immense," he said: in dual-motor form it puts down 544 horsepower and can do zero to 60 mph in 3.7 seconds. It's efficient, too. Even in hard driving and English winter cold, Jack averages an impressive 3.0 miles per kWh. (In U.S. spec, the dual-motor Polestar 4 is rated at 270 miles, or 434 km, of range.)
While he continues to be frustrated with the use-the-touchscreen-for-everything approach to controls, Jack is super impressed with the Polestar 4's plush, modern and sustainable interior. "This is quietly expensive," he said. "Everything you touch is lovely. Everything you touch is vegan." And Polestar puts a big emphasis on its environmental impact, so that may be a major selling point for some EV shoppers.
In the end, Jack is largely very impressed with this sedan-coupe-wagon chimera of an EV. Can it be enough to make Polestar the competitive, Porsche-fighting luxury brand it wants to be? We'll soon see. Because these days, you either have to be a volume-seller brand or a high-margin luxury one, or some combination of both; being Saab doesn't cut it anymore.
Contact the author: patrick.george@insideevs.com
