Polestar is in dire straits. The brand’s sole existing model, the Polestar 2, is built in China and is now subject to a 100% tariff, and Polestar isn't expecting to import as many as it did last year. The company’s stock is battered, with a valuation that’s only one-third as high as VinFast’s, and just dealt with a recent scrape where it was nearly de-listed from the New York Stock Exchange. Even Volvo is cashing out of its investment here. The crisis has prompted the exit of Polestar’s first CEO, replaced by a new one with previous stints at Opel, Nikola and VinFast.
The brand doesn’t just need a hit. It needs a home run.
After driving Polestar’s first SUV around Jackson Hole, Wyoming, I’m not convinced it’s a dinger. The Polestar 3 is a solid, helpful double. But it’ll take more than this to catapult Polestar to mainstream relevance.
(Full Disclosure: Polestar flew me to Jackson Hole, Wyoming—or The Hole, as I call it—to drive the Polestar 3. The company put me up in a nice hotel and gave me free food so I would feel all nice and happy when I drove it.)
What’s The Deal With The Polestar 3?
My colleague Kevin Williams already drove the Polestar 3 in Spain, earlier this year, and so I’m going to avoid retreading that ground with a long description of what this SUV is. In brief, it’s a large, electric-only SUV with up to 315 miles of range, up to 517 hp and a 111-kWh battery, 107 kWh of which is usable. It is based on the same second-generation Scalable Product Architecture (SPA2) that underpins the Volvo EX90, which I also recently tested.
That is where the problem for Polestar begins.
Polestar sits under the same corporate umbrella as Volvo but is pitched as the EV-forward, performance-oriented brand. When sales of the Polestar 2 began a few years ago, this was a major differentiator from Volvo, which has long played the hybrid game but was still in the early days of full battery power.
Now, however, Volvo has an EV flagship SUV, a compact electric SUV and a compact electric coupe-style SUV, with a bevy of additional EV products in its pipeline. It offers more EV models than Polestar, and with the Polestar 2 becoming a secret menu item soon enough, I’d expect Volvo EV sales to far outpace Polestar’s. And Volvo still offers hybrids, which is more of a strength than a weakness in today’s market.
Volvo also has name recognition and an established dealer network, something Polestar doesn’t have the luxury of right now. It sells through company stores, a model consumers tend to like, but one that means Polestar has to get consumers to stores they’ve never seen before to buy vehicles from a brand they’ve barely heard of. “Every sale for us is a conquest,” a Polestar representative said. Given that it’s far more expensive to acquire a customer than it is to keep one, Polestar’s got its work cut out.
All of this was a predictable problem. What Polestar likely didn’t see coming was the 100% tariff on China-built EVs that the Biden administration is now enacting, all but dooming any hopes of high-volume products from China. Given that Chinese conglomerate Geely Holding Group owns Polestar and has a deep roster of EV models and technologies that could be exported under the Polestar brand, the tariffs are a devastating blow—arguably more to this brand than any other.
So Polestar has relocated U.S.-market Polestar 3 production to South Carolina, though the cars we tested were built in China. The upcoming U.S.-market Polestar 4s will be built in South Korea. Production locations for the Polestar 5 and 6 haven’t been announced, but I’d imagine the company is scrambling to find or build a facility outside of China to make them.
To justify all that, Polestar needs to prove it can make a winner. The brand isn’t a big seller in China, and it’s still relatively unknown here. A company can be a small-volume niche player or it can build a bunch of plants all over the globe, but it can’t do both. So the Polestar 3 and 4 are what will determine the brand’s future. They have to sell people on Polestar’s relevance as a premium, performance-oriented, can’t-miss brand.
Does The Polestar 3 Pull It Off?
I’m not sure. As a performance-oriented, attractive SUV, it’s an undeniable win.
The 517-hp Performance Pack car hits 60 in 4.5 seconds, plenty fast for an electric SUV. It’s quicker than a base Porsche Macan Electric for similar money, though it can’t hang with the pricier Turbo. It looks better than the Porsche, too. The design is striking, blowing even the mechanically related EX90 out of the water. The PS3 is striking without being aggressive, unique without being busy and athletic without being too pinched to be practical.
Yet I’m not convinced that its athletic aspirations clearly delineate it from a Volvo. While the Macan Electric feels purposeful from the jump, the Polestar 3 rides, steers and accelerates like a more typical electric SUV. Throttle tip-in is gentle even in its most aggressive mode, making for a smooth if reserved driving experience.
Push it hard and you’ll find that the PS3 handles its 5,600-lb curb weight well, with its trick torque-vectoring differential allowing some journalists to successfully slide it on wet dirt roads. I stuck to the pavement, though, and given the pissing rain and 40-degree temperature didn’t dip too far into the Pirelli summer tires’ grip.
Which is to say I drove it like a normal electric SUV buyer. And until you’re at the edge, with ESP in sport mode and your foot flat to the floor, it doesn’t feel much different from an EX90. In many ways, that’s a good thing. It rides great, even on big wheels. It’s quiet and confident on the road. Steering is precise if not especially feelsome. But if the goal is to sell this product on its sporty performance credentials, I don’t think Polestar has gotten there.
It’s a confident handler a la a BMW X3 or even Volvo XC60, but in an age where even Kia SUVs offer 600-plus hp, what you get here isn’t going to get anyone too stirred up. Driving enthusiasts will appreciate how buttoned-down it feels when pushed, but to most people it’ll still feel like an electric Volvo.
That’s the tricky bit, though. Electric Volvos are good. And the PS3 carries over a lot of the good stuff of the EX90, like its excellent Android Automotive infotainment system, albeit with a different skin.
From the front row, the cabin looks like an EX90’s too, with the same central display and wheel-mounted driver display, a similar gauge design and a similar focus on beautiful, minimalist design with natural-feeling materials. I especially love the fabric-esque door cards, which make a normally ignored part of the cabin feel unique and expensive.
I particularly hate the window switches. Like the EX90—and the Volkswagen ID.4—the PS3 has a single set of window switches on the driver’s door, with a toggle switch to make them control the rear windows. It’s a frustrating bit of cost-cutting, which you can also spot in other areas around the interior. The PS3 also isn’t the most efficient car in its class—I averaged about 2.4 miles per kWh in mainly 60-70mph country highway driving, albeit with occasional bursts of speed.
Like the EX90, too, the Polestar 3 is both delayed and unfinished. The SUV was supposed to be on sale by now and, even with a longer development cycle, Polestar still hasn’t dotted all of its I’s and crossed its T’s. In what is perhaps the most hilarious example of the modern “we’ll fix it in post” ethos that permeates all industries, Polestar says the ability to skip tracks or raise the volume via the steering wheel will come via an over-the-air update.
For now, unless you’re adjusting the mirrors or steering wheel, 2 of the buttons on the right half of the steering wheel do nothing at all.
Vehicles on the drive program also experienced a number of worrying bugs. Our tire pressure monitoring system light was flashing, with the system reporting a fault and unable to show any pressures. The hand detection on the steering wheel for Pilot Assist functions was a common problem point, too.
In one journalist’s car, an error message read “Driver Support System Fault. Book A Service.” In another example, the infotainment system fully crashed, and said it would restart itself when the car was parked. It didn’t, so they rebooted it using a hard reset, after which the vehicle’s LTE connection never returned.
The Verdict
Those types of teething issues are tough to forgive in a car like a Volvo EX90. For a new brand, though, they can be fatal.
Many people have no experience with Polestar, and if the new, highest-volume product isn’t fully baked yet, it’s going to turn a lot of people away. Absent these flaws the Polestar 3 will be a solid contender, but I’d be doing my readers a disservice if I reviewed a car on what it could be when it’s fixed, not what it is now.
Even without the bugs, though, I’m not sure this is destined to be a blockbuster. The second car I drove—a Launch Edition with the Pilot & Plus packages—stickered in at $88,100. If you want the Performance Pack it’d be another $6,000. For that money, you could have your pick of the Rivian R1S Dual Large, Audi Q6 E-Tron or a base Porsche Macan Electric. (Or even a Tesla Model X, if you’ve somehow been waiting all this time to get into one of those.)
But you can also get a less-optioned, cheaper Polestar 3 in the $75,000 range. And it still does make a case for itself: It looks great, has a gorgeous interior, drives well and offers decent range. But the automotive business isn’t fair. For an upstart, being competitive isn’t enough. To court buyers who don’t know your brand, you need to offer them something better than what they can get anywhere else. Even with their own challenges, we’ve seen shades of that from upstarts like Rivian and Lucid; the edge Polestar offers is far less clear.
It is a relatively typical luxury electric SUV, with an above-average number of software issues at launch. If and when Polestar fixes it, the 3 will be a real, solid option. So was the Polestar 2.
But it’s neither innovative nor polished enough to change Polestar’s game. The 2 and 3 have gotten the brand to second base. But if Polestar is going to be a winner, the brand better hope the 4 is a real slugger.
Gallery: Polestar 3 First Drive: Jackson, Wyoming
Contact the author: mack.hogan@insideevs.com
