Polestar engineers have managed to maintain the look of the Precept concept car through to production.
Allen said they look “pretty much identical”, adding: “We use our ability to deliver cars as close as we possibly can to [Polestar CEO and designer] Thomas Ingenlath’s designs inside and out.”
To that end, the large panoramic roof remains, as do the long wheelbase and low roof height.
“It’s an extremely low car [for an electric car],” said Allen. “Not as low as an internal- combustion-engine car but close, and they don’t have batteries underneath. That has been a particular challenge.”
Much of the engineering work on the 5 is being done with future Polestar products in mind.
There’s “a lot of scalability” in the new platform, said Swift. “You start with a car first, then look at the products in other spaces, then how many of those spaces we can play in while designing it once. It’s part of the future, definitely.”
First ride: Polestar 5 Prototype review
As a means of getting familiar with an all-new car, passenger rides are a bit of a blunt instrument. But sometimes the car in question does something so novel, and does it so effortlessly, that it doesn’t matter which seat you’re sitting in because the cat’s just as far out of the bag.
This is what happens during our passenger ride in a leggy, pre-production Polestar 5 on the Dunlop dry handling circuit at the MIRA proving ground – a circuit Autocar road testers know quite well because it’s where we set the magazine’s benchmarking lap times.
After some chit-chat about the Porsche Taycan-rivalling 5 being “an opportunity to mature the Polestar brand” in dynamic terms, the project’s principal vehicle dynamics engineer – 31-year-old Chris Baguley – without warning delicately backs its low, camouflaged form into one of the course’s two inviting hairpin bends, unsticks the back axle with an injection of torque and then rides out an enormous, graceful powerslide.