Polestar 5 prototype review

From £89,490

With Lotus Elise-style construction, a super-thin battery and little chassis electrickery, this could be a purist’s Porsche Taycan

The new Polestar 5 is an engineer’s dream come true. Whereas previous Polestars have all been based on a platform shared with other Geely group products, this sports saloon was effectively a clean-sheet design.

As a result, it isn’t just another platform-sharing EV with stupid power (although it does have up to 872bhp, because it’s still the way these things are done). It’s based on its own Polestar Performance Architecture, which, unusually, is a bonded extruded aluminium chassis. While there are still plenty of shared electrical bits, this allowed Polestar to go all out, without the compromises and limiting factors that usually come with a shared platform.

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DESIGN & STYLING

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A bonded extruded aluminium chassis in itself is nothing new. It has most famously underpinned many Lotuses since the Elise, and other low-volume sports car makers have it. Low volume is key here, because the Polestar 5 represents the first time a volume model is built this way.

The engineers say there’s no one innovation to make this possible; Polestar is just in the ideal place to try it. The compromise of this method is that it makes each car pricier to make, but the tooling is very cheap compared with the huge stamping machines that churn out steel unibody parts. Thus it would be uneconomical to produce a Toyota Corolla this way, but as long as the volumes don’t get too enormous, it could turn out cheaper. In addition, it affords the flexibility to change things, as modifying the tooling isn’t prohibitively expensive.

One clever bit of minimalism is that the rear light bar doubles as a spoiler lip.
Illya Verpraet
Road Tester

The 5 being a kind of stand-alone car performance car meant it presented the perfect opportunity. The platform gives it the required stiffness, and it will ultimately be used in other cars, most imminently the Polestar 6 roadster – but while conversations were had with Lotus, the Geely siblings decided to go their own ways.

The new Polestar is called the 5 because it’s the brand’s fifth car, but they could have called it the 1 because, much more than that plug-in hybrid coupé of 2019, this car is supposed to be a manifesto of what the brand is about, which is EVs with great design, driving dynamics and sustainability.

Where most electric saloons have cramped interiors (Porsche Taycan and Lotus Emeya) or otherwise feel odd because they’re practically an SUV wearing saloon skin (BMW i5 and Genesis Electrified G80), the 5 was designed from the start around that chassis, with double wishbones at the front, an extra-thin battery and the lowest seat rails they could get Recaro to make, all so it would actually look and feel like a saloon.

You don’t even need to put the 5 next to the BMW i5 to see that, visually at least, they have succeeded. Although it looks very wide, it’s actually slightly narrower than the Taycan; it just doesn’t look it because it’s so low.

INTERIOR

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My test car’s interior was largely production-spec, save for the large central touchscreen, which was still running a spit-and-Kleenex software build. By and large, it will be similar to what you get in the Polestar 4 SUV, albeit with a few upgrades here and there. From the conversations I had with engineers, it seems they’ve realised they’ve gone a bit too far on the screen dependence, but there’s only so much they can do about the standard box of parts in the shortish term, and every new software version is getting a little bit better. Still, the user interface is very likely to remain Polestar’s Achilles heel for a while.

Otherwise, the interior is very lovely. You do sit very low, and the seats have every adjustment possibility you could wish for. The materials Polestar uses really are different from the norm, with fabric topping the dashboard, and light colours and wood instead of gloomy black and carbonfibre. It certainly feels more distinctive than either the Taycan or the Emeya.

The boot is rated as 365 litres or 1128 litres when you fold the rear seats down. It looks bigger in person and you can fill it completely, as there’s no rear window to block. There is a further 62-litre frunk, but you need to pull a lever and find the catch to open it.
Illya Verpraet
Road Tester

There’s no rear windscreen, which is silly, but I would need to spend more time on the road to decide if it really bothers me.

Thanks to the big sunroof, it feels airy enough in the back, and there’s a lot of knee room. However, despite the Taycan-style cutouts in the battery pack, the floor is quite high, so tall adults won’t find it all that accommodating.

ENGINES & PERFORMANCE

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So that’s the design and materials boxes ticked. Sustainability is hard to assess, although Polestar has plenty of good stories. The leather comes with very high welfare standards, there’s 35%-recycled aluminium in the structure and the seatbacks are made of impregnated flax.

For now, we can begin to see if that sportiness rings true. Fuller tests will surely follow this early taster of some pre-production prototypes at Millbrook Proving Ground. I only drove the Performance, with 871bhp and 749lb ft of torque, but there will also be a standard Dual Motor version with a mere 737bhp and 599lb ft.

Polestar has developed a single-motor model, which we had a passenger ride in a few years ago, but they’re still not sure whether they will actually sell it. I say give it a year.

The front motor comes from ZF, whereas the rear one is Polestar-developed. It has a disconnect clutch so that the 5 can cruise along with just front-wheel drive to save energy.

The Performance, according to its on-screen timer, managed 2.9sec to 60mph on Millbrook’s mile straight, which is better than the claimed time and feels suitably violent.

As in other Polestars, you have a few regenerative braking strengths, and can toggle ‘creep’ to give you full free-wheeling and one-pedal driving modes. It’s not quite as intuitive as paddles, but every setting you might want is there.

RIDE & HANDLING

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And so to those dynamics. In short, they’re excellent. It’s a remarkably simple set-up: there’s no four-wheel steering (although the platform has the provision for it) or variable-ratio steering, no torque split device and no air suspension. The Taycan and Emeya have air, but the engineers say that the 5 doesn’t need it, thanks to the car’s fundamental layout being so right; the magnetorheological adaptive dampers provide enough bandwidth. And anyway, packaging the airbags would have raised the bonnet, and that just wouldn’t do for such a design-led company.

The lack of complicated chassis tech adds up to a very transparent character, particularly when it comes to the steering. Moderately weighted and sped, it’s free from artificial sportiness. Instead, it just accurately translates your inputs into direction changes – which sounds like an obvious thing for steering to do but isn’t in practice. Load up the chassis in a corner and it weights up accordingly.

Even though the 5 doesn’t have chassis trickery to hide its considerable weight, it darts into corners willingly, with a nice rear-driven balance on the way out. It’s a shame the ESC Sport mode remains quite conservative and there’s no way to turn it fully off.

The engineers are still finalising the damper settings, although these are hard to judge without a drive on a real road anyway. As it stands, the ride is quite connected and it certainly doesn’t paper over expansion joints, feeling slightly wooden rather than brittle.

It copes quite well with bigger bumps, because one of the aims was that all three damper settings should be usable on a British B-road. They definitely were on Millbrook’s approximation thereof, but I reckon there’s scope to make the Comfort mode a bit more forgiving. While a passive set-up won’t ever equal the cloud-like Active Ride on an appropriately optioned Taycan, a bit more ride isolation ought to be on the cards.

The 5 is fairly quiet at motorway speeds, and feels very stable up to its 155mph top speed.

MPG & RUNNING COSTS

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Efficiency of 3.4mpkWh for the Dual Motor and 3.0mpkWh for the Performance isn’t setting any new benchmarks and, despite a sizeable 106kWh battery, neither is the range (416 miles for the Dual Motor, 351 miles for the Performance).

Fully loaded Launch Edition versions of the Dual Motor and Performance are set to cost £89,500 and £104,900 respectively, undercutting the Taycan equivalents by quite a margin.

The 5 can charge at up to 350kW, which should give a 10-80% charging time of 22 minutes.
Illya Verpraet
Road Tester

VERDICT

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Clearly, there’s a lot here that we don’t know, including real-world range, the ride quality and how buggy the infotainment will be. And with Taycans struggling to find owners, you can’t help wondering if an electric saloon is really what Polestar should be building. But it’s good to have another option that isn’t an SUV, particularly when it’s a good-looking, largely UK-developed one that focuses on handling.

Illya Verpraet

Illya Verpraet Road Tester Autocar
Title: Road Tester

As a road tester, Illya drives everything from superminis to supercars, and writes reviews and comparison tests, while also managing the magazine’s Drives section. Much of his time is spent wrangling the data logger and wielding the tape measure to gather the data for Autocar’s in-depth instrumented road tests.

He loves cars that are fun and usable on the road – whether piston-powered or electric – or just cars that are very fit for purpose. When not in test cars, he drives an R53-generation Mini Cooper S.