TG Electric Awards 2022: Chris Harris’s pick

I am going to cheat and pick a hybrid, because these are our Electric Awards and we can make them up as we go along. The Polestar 1 is, for me, one of the most interesting cars I’ve driven in the past 10 years. I always suspected that a hybrid would be the solution for me on the road, but I’ve never driven a hybrid that was a hybrid. Lots of cars call themselves hybrids, but they’re not. They tend to be petrol-engined cars that have a tiny amount of electricity to appease politicians, or range extenders that people use in weird ways.

So I drove this thing and it had a range of 70 miles on EV only, and then another 300 miles on petrol. So I thought, “I might have a go at that” and I ended up buying one. And I might have the only one in the UK because when the lovely man from Polestar handed it over he said, “Congratulations, you’re our first customer!” So I’ve bought 12 widescreens and seven sets of wheels to make sure I can survive.

But I’ve done 2,000 miles in it now and it’s everything I hoped it would be. It’s beautiful, it’s simple, it’s distinctive. I plug it in at night and in town I EV it, and I don’t upset anyone and I’m zero emissions. Then when I get to a charging point and it doesn’t work, which happens quite a lot, I just turn the engine on – a 400bhp petrol engine, combined it makes 600bhp – and it goes. I was very proud of it the other day when I dusted an Audi RS4.