Volvo V60 Polestar | Spotted

Polestar is about to make a return to proper driver's cars - but it will be nothing like its Rebel Blue past

Polestar is perhaps unique among current carmakers in the sense that many of its buyers remain ignorant of its origin story - i.e. the one that has nothing to do with building minimalist EVs with Scandi interiors and tablet-sized touchscreens, but rather bolting roll cages into Volvo 850s for the Swedish Touring Car Championship. The one that spent two decades tuning turbocharged engines before anyone at Volvo HQ uttered the word "electrification." A less mainstream Polestar, to be sure - but also one that produced the kind of fast wagon that would fit into the current configurator like a McDonalds wrapper at a State visit.

Polestar's trajectory is one of the more interesting arcs in modern performance-car history. Flash Racing, as the team was originally known, became Volvo's de facto motorsport partner in the mid-‘90s, before graduating to road-car tuning programmes by the 2000s, and eventually earning the right to produce standalone models under the Volvo umbrella. The V60 Polestar, launched in 2014, was the culmination of all that work — a factory-built estate carrying the full Polestar badge, not just an options-list engine remap. For the UK, Volvo allocated 125 examples. This is one of them.

Under the bonnet, you get a 3.0-litre turbocharged straight-six, channelling 350hp to all four wheels via Volvo's Geartronic automatic. It's worth pausing on that engine for a moment because Volvo would promptly go on to abandon six-cylinder power entirely, standardising around a family of 2.0-litre four-cylinder units across its entire lineup. So while the T6 was arguably the peak of Polestar’s combustion powers, it also represents the end of an era — the last of the turbocharged sixes that Volvo would ever produce. The fact that Polestar tuned it to generate more power than a contemporary BMW 335i makes it all the more interesting.

This particular car is a one-owner example with 73k on the clock and a full Volvo main dealer service history. Rebel Blue, the colour, was essentially the Polestar signature — a deep, saturated shade that said "this isn't a standard V60" without resorting to stripes or diffusers. The spec sheet is generous: 20-inch Polestar alloys, sport leather seats, electric sunroof, heated seats front and rear, adaptive cruise, lane departure warning, and a rear parking camera. It's the full-fat version, in other words, not a base model with a badge upgrade.

On the road, the V60 Polestar occupied a peculiar and appealing niche. It was genuinely quick — 0-62mph in around five seconds, though it didn’t try too hard to be genuinely thrilling. Instead, thanks to its Ohlins-developed suspension, which kept things taut without the spine-compressing firmness of some of its rivals, it wanted to be poised and comfortable and relatively understated. Save for the paint, you might not have given it a second glance in a supermarket car park - meaning that its keeper not only had 430 litres of boot space to fill, but also the tingly pleasure of Q-car ownership.

At £24,500, it is not short of rivals. That amount of cash will buy you bigger named cars with V8s aboard. But few will boast the same rarity factor - 125 UK cars means you could attend every PH Sunday Service for a year and never see another one. Plus, of course, the six-cylinder soundtrack, the analogue character of the thing - none of it is coming back. Whether or not that makes it a shrewd investment is another matter, though its embodiment of a specific moment time can hardly be disputed. The current iteration of Polestar has not lost its emphasis on building driver's cars, as the incoming 5 shows. But it’s nothing like this.

SPECIFICATION | VOLVO V60 POLESTAR

Engine: 2,953cc straight-six, turbocharged
Transmission: six-speed automatic, all-wheel drive
Power (hp): 350@5,250rpm
Torque (lb ft): 369@3,000rpm
MPG: 27.7 (NEDC)
CO2: 237g/km
Year registered: 2015
Recorded mileage: 73,077
Price new: £49,775
Yours for: £24,500

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