Polestar 2 Long Range AWD Performance Pack - long-term review

I like the Polestar 2. Which is kind of handy, seeing as this will be my co-conspirator for the next few months, and it’s always good to start a new relationship with a positive attitude.

Yes, it may be based on the same basic skeleton CMA (compact modular architecture) as Volvo’s XC40 and running under the aegis of Chinese MegaGlobalCorp Geely (officially known as Zhejiang Geely Holding Group Co, owned by a single human Li Shifu), but it has actually managed to carve out a personality niche all of its own.

And it’s even more impressive because it has done so not by being wacky and attention-seeking, but by being sober, understated and calm. Calm is good. It suits electric motivation, soothes you through commuting and general duties, doesn’t frustrate with gimmick.

Crucially for me it’s a practical hatch, and while I like the Tesla Model 3, it has a boot (not ideal for my small-ish dog), and the Model Y is just a bit… inflated. An SUV doesn’t appeal as much. So practical and calm in a saloon-alike, slightly tippy-toed body is good. I’m ordering my stairlift and house slippers next week. 

But that’s not to say that the P2 Dual Motor we have here in the TG Garage can’t deliver when it comes to going that little bit faster. Over four hundred horsepower and 487lb ft of torque has a good go at nullifying the 2.2-tonne weight, and four wheel drive traction delivers a 0-62mph time under five seconds.

Ok, it’s limited to 127mph, but that’s largely irrelevant, especially as those sorts of speeds consume electrons like a mini black hole. The Performance Pack variant we have here steps that idea up a notch, and has some really rather pretty Öhlins ‘dual flow valve’ adjustable dampers  - which I will be ‘investigating’ soon enough, and by that I mean disastrously fiddling with - and there’s a fair amount of control to be had through a decent corner.

Saying that, the car seems to be currently set up for hot laps - something I’ll be dialling back as soon as I can find the rear jacking point and a warm garage. 

As for our actual car, well, on the Polestar configurator at the time of writing, you can pick up a basic Polestar 2 standard range single motor for £39,900. A long range single motor adds three grand, a dual motor long range six. They all get three years’ servicing, connected services, roadside assistance and warranty, and all feature the good bits like LED lights, power/heated front seats, OTA updates, baked-in Google/Android goodness, parking cameras and loads of ADAS. 

We’ve got a Snow white (a £900 option) Dual Motor (which all come with the bigger battery) car with ‘charcoal WeaveTech and Black Ash’ interior, suitably peppered with the aforementioned Performance Pack for £5,000 (the Öhlins, Gold four-piston Brembo calipers, 20-inch forged alloys, gold belts, stickier summer tyres and a gloss black chunk in the panoramic sunroof), the £4k Plus Pack (Harmon Kardon stereo, a heat pump, the sunroof itself, tinted rear window and inductive phone charger) as well as the £3k Pilot Pack that sees the LED headlights turn pixel-adaptive, the front fogs becoming LED (with cornering lights), extra driver assist and 360-degree cameras. Add a set of £100 mats, and you’re looking at a car that stands at a smidge under £59,000. But that’s with basically every option you can option without negating some other options.

So far - and I’m talking about the first 1,000 miles - it’s been really rather nice. Near-zero temperatures and general grumpy weather has seen the P2 doing roughly 200-miles of real-world range, which is some way off the claimed, jet-powered-pigs-on-fast-approach WLTP prediction of 299, but I was prepared for that. It’s also something we’ll be addressing in later updates, seeing as my venerable home charging wallbox is essentially Jurassic specification and can’t charge the P2’s relatively large battery completely overnight. Consecutive long-haul days see me at a lot of public chargers.

Still, that’s good for consumer testing, right?