The super-saloon class has, in recent years, been dominated by the Germans – and, to a lesser extent, the Italians.
Upstarts such as Polestar are hoping to muscle in by taking the familiar recipe and making it ‘fusion’: get hold of a big, comfortable saloon with a plush interior and supercar power, just like mama used to make, but instead of fitting a straight six, a V8 or a V10, bolt an electric motor to each axle.
In my mind, my Polestar 4 is more a very fast EV and not quite a super-saloon. So I lined up the 536bhp, all-wheel-drive 4 against a near-identical example fitted with the full-fat Performance Pack to see if this turns it into an Alfa Romeo Giulia Quadrifoglio fighter.
This pack adds no extra power (which, frankly, the car doesn’t need) but includes 22in wheels, more firmly calibrated ZF dampers and Brembo brakes with 392mm front discs. Oh, and gold seatbelts.
This enhanced 4 was finished in the same Electron baby blue as mine, but it wore £900 body-coloured lower cladding—a worthwhile option in my view. It makes the car feel less SUV-lite and more like a traditional saloon. Except it is, technically, a hatchback — but you know what I mean.
I took both cars to Bicester Motion’s one-kilometre handling circuit, a tight and technical layout, to see how they compared. This was the first opportunity I had to drive my own car properly in anger. It is brutally quick. The back straight at Bicester is only 310 metres long, yet by the end of it I was already sailing past 90mph.
Polestar’s throttle mapping is unusually aggressive. Range mode is not a conventional eco setting – the throttle never feels especially dulled and performance remains more than ample. Performance mode, meanwhile, allows full throttle with very little pedal travel. The steering offers several weight settings but limited communication.
Even with the stability control in Sport, the dominant trait is understeer. Trail braking, lifting mid-corner, mashing the accelerator – nothing really elicited much in the way of fun. Grip levels, however, are enormous. One novelty I encountered for the first time was brushing against circuit noise limits in an EV – yep, that’s right, due to the howls of pain from the tyres.
The only hardware changes in the Performance Pack concern suspension and brakes, and that is where the differences lie. The Performance Pack adds stiffer springs and anti-roll bars, which reduce body roll – and you can feel it.
