News
standalone performance division
- is on the cusp of revealing its first distinct production model ought to be an authentic reason to be cheerful. True, not everything the erstwhile tuner has done up to this point is worthy of commendation (the current V60 is a case in point) but, like all equivalent sub-brands, the Gothenburg-based firm has been hamstrung by the stipulations - not to mention the product line - of its parent.
Now, with any luck, the strategic decision to thrust Polestar into the limelight, and have it market future cars under its own badge, might just liberate some of the enthusiasm and talent festering in an organization previously kept on a very tight leash. Granted, a good portion of this sentiment is based on a fondly recollected visit to Sweden back in 2012, when the tuner unveiled a
one-off 500hp S60
- but time spent with that team made an impression.
This, after all, is the same firm which spent its formative years tweaking and prodding the dowdy C30 until finally it outputted an Audi RS3-crushing 450hp. Better still, while there was the aggressively styled concept car that everyone remembers, there was also a plain-trousers development mule that the engineers used to tool round Gothenburg in, annihilating bewildered Porsche 911 owners. Related in a boardroom, that's a very fun fact - not least because it's probably the sort of thing we'd all do with a race team's resources to hand.
Then there was the S60 itself, the car we'd come to see. No less anecdote-worthy, the model was the result of a $300k transatlantic bung - presumably by an American also tickled with the idea of slaying Camaros between the lights. Polestar promptly extracted an additional 200hp from Volvo's buttoned-down straight six, replaced the deathly-dull slusher with a six-speed manual, hooked it all up to a fifth-generation Haldex all-wheel-drive system (not forgetting to include an electro-mechanical LSD on the rear) and bedded the whole thing down on money-no-object Ohlin dampers.
The result was still short of final sign-off when I drove it, but naturally it went, turned and sounded like no Volvo you'd ever dreamed of. Rather cannily though, Polestar hadn't gone entirely off the deep end: the car was bullnecked and fiercely fast, yet was still tuned for neutrality and forgiveness at the limit - a useful trait when you're also using it to tout your wares and talent to safety-obsessed Volvo execs. Two years later, the big fish swallowed the tuning minnow whole.
Now Polestar's future - we're told - is in electric and hybrid performance models. Plenty different from its carefree days of retrofitting straitlaced engines with larger turbochargers and race cams, yet clearly a prerequisite of Volvo's plan to compete head-on with the likes of Tesla - Sweden having become the American carmaker's sixth biggest European market last year. That's an ambitious target for what is still very much fledgling entity in brand recognition terms. But with a 600hp petrol-electric coupe rumoured to constitute the firm's opening salvo, a very different Polestar seems to have lost none of its early initiative.