Polestar 5 review: Gorgeous, fast and missing something important

[SINGAPORE] Reasons to want a Polestar 5: it’s comfy, fast and impossibly good-looking. Reasons against? It’s pricey, short on practicality and also...what exactly is a Polestar 5?

The straightforward part of the answer is that Polestar is a racing name that Volvo acquired to turn into a Swedish electric brand. Its model numbers are all over the place, however. The Polestar 3 is a large sport utility vehicle (SUV), the 4 is a sleeker SUV positioned below it, and the upcoming 7 is a compact SUV destined to be cheaper than either of them, so the numbers tell you nothing about size or price.

The Polestar 5 is the odd one out as a sleek four-door grand tourer stretching more than five metres long, and built on its own aluminium architecture. In pure performance terms it’s either hot or extra hot.

It’s also late. The 5 began life as 2020’s Precept concept car, with the production version scheduled for 2024. Its due-by date came and went, which matters in the fast-fashion world of electric vehicles, where a two-year stretch amounts to several seasons.

When the Precept first appeared, a sleek Scandinavian electric sedan looked tantalisingly futuristic, but showrooms are now filled with all manner of electric cars, and the future has become rather crowded.

Luckily for Polestar, the 5 is the spitting image of the concept car, and its looks have aged well. It seems less styled than sculpted, with a low, smooth nose and lines that flow to a broad tail. It could not look cooler if it were carved from a block of pure ice.

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The Polestar hides its 106 kilowatt-hour battery pack well, too, somehow concealing the bulk that batteries tend to add to sedans in the belly area. The same pack feeds both the 748- horsepower Dual Motor version I drove (yours for S$587,000 with Certificate Of Entitlement) and the Performance variant (884 hp, S$627,000).

Given how the Dual Motor blasts to 100 kmh in 3.9 seconds, it’s hard to see the appeal of the Performance version, which does the same in 0.7 second less. It’s not like you can use the time saved to work on that presentation to the board.

Anyway, while it’s mighty quick, what impresses more about the Dual Motor is its agility.

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The Polestar’s eagerness to whip into bends makes it feel like a much smaller car on the move. At 2,462 kg it’s no featherweight, but it seems to carry much of its weight towards the back, which makes it nimble rather than ponderous.

The brakes could do with more bite during hard stops, and while it doesn’t muster the same amount of feel or poise as a Porsche Taycan (an obvious rival), it’s at least more engaging to drive than any number of lofty SUVs, electric or otherwise.

It’s set up for comfort, too, though it’s more relaxing to sit in the front seats because the rear suspension is noticeably firmer and the ride there more jiggly. Still, the one-pedal driving mode (lift off the accelerator and the car slows itself) is so smooth your passengers won’t nod along like dashboard dogs.

All four main seats are ventilated and massage you, even the rear ones recline, and legroom is vast.

The cabin strikes a neat balance between minimalism and plainness, while the materials are just about nice enough that the interior’s understatedness never crosses over into cheapness.

Mind you, there are quirks. The fifth seat is a fold-up perch, so consider the Polestar 5 a 4+1 seater. Look over your shoulder and you see a wall where the rear window should be. A roof camera feeds the rear-view mirror instead, which takes some getting used to. The glass roof has no sunshade, which in our climate takes a leap of faith in infrared coating.

Practicality is where the Polestar lets itself down most. There’s no glovebox (yes, really), little storage between the front seats, and for such a large car the boot is disappointingly small, at just 365 litres. The 62-litre frunk makes up for it somewhat, but you do wonder where all the space went.

Perhaps the most daunting thing, though, is the S$8,090 road tax bill that those mighty motors incur. Beyond that, this is simply a lovely car with the wrong spec for Singapore.

A proper five-seater version driven by a single motor with around 340 hp would make much more sense. It might not fly down the road like this one does, but it might fly out of the showroom. That in turn would help with the remaining problem of hardly anyone knowing what a Polestar 5 is.