Polestar 3 - long-term review

Cybercrime, as we all know, is the new ground zero for law enforcement. Villains take note: you don’t need expensive kit or nerdy IT goons gone bad, you need me. I’m a one-man EMP device. Phones, laptops, smart TVs: you name it, I will fail to make them work. I’m a technology magician, only in reverse.

This is making my automotive life increasingly difficult. The Polestar 3 is a beacon of digital connectivity, a car that invites you to become part of an impossibly shiny ecosystem. All good in theory, but stress tested by me in inimitable fashion. For example, Polestar really wants you to use your phone as a digital key, a brand invocation I’d resolutely ignored. Instead, I was relying on the little credit card with its fob thing for distance recognition. A bit fiddly but tolerable.

Also, it turns out, prone to running out of charge with nothing on it to indicate when this might happen. To keep it charged, you need to place the fob on the inductive charging pad on the centre console, and check the centre display for its SOC. Let it run flat and you won’t be able to get into the car. I learnt this the hard way one evening.

Anyway, I’m now fully digitally keyed up and have a new App to fiddle with. But a convert? Not yet. A quick look on Polestar forums suggests that the card, fob and digital key all excite, shall we say, various levels of comment. The digital key uses Ultra Wideband tech for greater security and convenience, and if you keep the card about your person as back-up you should be all good. But you need to keep the fob charged, too. This is a weird interpretation of convenience, if you ask me. Especially as you can add OCD to my EMP functionality, except that you can hardly check that your car’s locked if it automatically unlocks as you approach it. This is all ruinous for my mental health.

There have been a few other glitches, highlighting the pitfalls of software defined cars. The Polestar 3 has separate volume channels for phone and audio. When I finished a call and returned to a podcast, the system didn’t hand back to the audio and wouldn’t adjust. That was cured the next time I got in the car. Also temperamental was the manual control for the air con. That also mysteriously fixed itself.

All of which suggests that technology is great when it works. And a royal pain in the arse when it doesn’t. Especially when the car itself is so good… Did I mention that the Polestar 3 is a car?