Styling
Ultimately, Polestar's aesthetic DNA has its roots in erstwhile parent company
Volvo, but the EV arm of Geely is now making moves to shift its vehicles' appearance away from that of the longer-serving Swedish carmaker's machines. That leaves the undeniably handsome 3 in a strange place, because you can afford it nothing more than a passing glance and it resultingly looks rather obviously Volvo-ish, yet if you peruse it more carefully you suddenly realise that it doesn't really look much like a Volvo at all. Whichever scenario it is, we happen to really like the attractive lines of the Polestar 3.
Its signature trick is a low roofline, but mercifully Polestar has avoided using the term 'coupe-SUV' for the 3 (it's reserving that moniker for the 4) and instead is keen to reinforce the idea that a large, luxury, five-seater SUV like this does not need a huge amount of superfluous headroom in the cabin to feel prestigious. To that end, the 3 is long and wide, so people will be comfortable inside it, but both the roof and the leading edge of the bonnet (if we can call it that, when it has no engine sitting underneath it) are much lower than they would be in comparable SUVs, electric or otherwise. The other benefit of this, of course, is a low coefficient of drag figure for a machine of this type, measuring in at a comparatively slippery 0.296.
Elsewhere, neat Polestar-specific touches include the funky upswept line of the shoulder beyond the C-pillar backwards, a rear-light signature which is a flattened and inverted replica of that found on the Polestar 2 - and which, let's face it, is the best light signature going in the current automotive marketplace; you always know immediately when you're following a Polestar 2 at night - the smoothed-off 'face' incorporating the 'Smart Panel' for all of key componentry for the 3's abundance of active safety systems, and some Thor Hammer headlights that move away from the overall Volvo shape and lean more towards the split light clusters we're going to see on the impending 4 and 5 models. Yes, taken holistically, the Polestar 3 is a looker, no doubt about it, especially when it is sitting on its largest 22-inch wheels (an option on our non-Performance Pack test car, costing a chunky £2,100).
Interior
The Polestar 3's cabin is a salutary lesson in how you make a very plain, clean dashboard design look and feel anything but boring. Hollowed-out volumes and crisp design lines give the interior that sort of fresh Scandi refinement that's just so pleasing to behold, and it's an ambience helped by superb material quality - well, certainly in our UK test car. Neil did report at the first drive of the 3 that some of the wood trims can feel a little flimsy, so check out various options if you're ordering this electric SUV to make sure you get the most solid-feeling fascia.
Upholding Polestar's eco-conscious company ethic, many of the materials used within the 3's cabin have been chosen purely on their sustainability credentials, including bio-attributed MicroTech, animal welfare-certified leather (from Bridge of Weir, in Scotland) and fully traceable wool upholsteries. There are little reminders of this corporate saintliness dotted about the 3's cabin, printed in that elegant, simple font of Polestar's, and it's a nice touch, even if it's potentially at risk of being labelled as automotive virtue-signalling. Nevertheless, using recyclable stuff for the cabin hasn't diminished its quality feel one iota, in our opinion.
Tech remains impressive, though, with a lovely little nine-inch screen mounted on the top of the steering column forming the instrument cluster, while the main bulk of the human-machine interface work is handled by the 14.5-inch central touchscreen co-developed with Google. An obviously button-light fascia means you have to control almost everything on the car through the portrait display, which can occasionally be frustrating and which also requires a fair degree of familiarisation, but it generally works pretty well and Polestar ensures you never have to scroll down the screen on any given menu - all the tiles you want will be right there on each landing page. Also, switching off the more annoying ADAS features (like lane-keep assist and speed-limit warning) every time you get into the SUV doesn't require a degree in physics, which is a boon.
Practicality
That lower roofline does indeed limit maximum headroom, but not to the extent that anyone tall sitting onboard the Polestar 3 would ever be bothered. It'll probably only inconvenience those who wish to travel around while wearing a stovepipe hat. With a nice big panoramic roof as standard on the Long Range Dual Motor, light floods into the cabin to make it feel pleasant in both rows of seating, while there aren't any passenger positions where you can feel your bonce rubbing the car's headlining. So maybe the Polestar's lower-roof trick isn't so bad after all.
It does, though, rob the 3 of the most eye-catching of boot-space figures. Considering how big this car is on the outside (4.9 metres long and two metres wide), capacity of 484 litres with all seats in use and 1,411 litres with the second row folded away is not particularly impressive for this class of vehicle. Still, there's 32 litres of 'front boot' under the Polestar 3's bonnet, while the cabin has a decent array of useful storage and stowage solutions dotted about the place, so the SUV should serve fine as helpful family transport.
Performance
There will be a Long Range Single Motor model joining the Polestar 3's line-up in the fullness of time, but for now there's just the Dual Motor arrangement, which you can have either with or without a Performance Pack fitted. The difference in price is £5,600 and, for that, the Performance Pack raises outputs to 380kW (517hp) and 910Nm, increases of 27hp and 70Nm over the regular Dual Motor's 360kW (490hp) and 840Nm figures. It also brings in its own, sportier tune of the air suspension (more below), the 22-inch forged alloys as standard and some additional Swedish Gold detailing for various bits of the P3's form.
Is it worth it, especially as - on paper - the only changes it appears to bring are a 0.3-second-quicker 0-62mph run at 4.7 seconds and a 41-mile reduction in the quoted outright driving range to 349 miles overall? Well, judging by the LRDM non-PP's efforts, no, the Performance Pack isn't worth it. Despite weighing 2.7 tonnes (oof) and 'only' having 490hp to play with, the Polestar 3 LRDM is plenty quick enough for anyone's daily needs. It whirrs quickly away from 30 zones up to 60mph and has masses of oomph for easy motorway work. In short, it is indecently swift despite its significant bulk, and the calibration of both its throttle response and three-way-switchable regenerative braking (off, Low or Standard) are also excellent too. Therefore, the 3 LRDM is essentially mighty rapid and totally effortless to drive, and that's a most welcome combination of factors, we're sure you'll agree.
Its party piece is the range, though. The 3 Long Range (with or without the Performance Pack) is one of the few EVs out there with a three-figure battery capacity, measuring a whopping 111kWh (net), of which 107kWh is usable. Sure, such a gigantic power cell is directly responsible for the sheer mass of the Polestar 3, but it genuinely does lead to superb real-world range. We got into our test car with the cluster suggesting it had 65 per cent battery and a potential range of 150 miles, which equates to a fairly lowly 2.2 miles/kWh or thereabouts. Yet we drove it for another 81 miles, we didn't hang about in it, and it ended up at the conclusion of the test with 33 per cent battery remaining and an indicated range of 75 miles; we also achieved 2.4 miles/kWh, somewhat lower than the official claims but easily boosted by being a little gentler with the P3's throttle.
What we're trying to say here is that while we still don't think it's reasonable for owners to expect they will actually get 390 miles from a single charge of the Polestar's battery pack, we
do think 300 miles is going to be a doddle to regularly achieve without massively adjusting your driving style nor use of in-car electrical drains accordingly, which makes the 3's massive battery pack all the more worthwhile. Better still, despite 'only' being 400-volt architecture, the Polestar 3 has a maximum DC charging rate of 250kW, which - if you can find a public ultra-rapid unit that'll match that output - will see the battery go from 10-80 per cent charge in just 30 minutes. At home, you'll want to avail yourself of a fancier three-phase 11kW AC wallbox, as 0-100 per cent for the battery will take 11 hours on one of those. Using some back-of-a-fag-packet maths, we reckon a typical 7.4kWh would require more like 14.5 hours to do the same job.
Ride & Handling
Although it's down to the Polestar 4 to provide the true SUV sportiness in the manufacturer's line-up - the Dual Motor model of that car has 544hp, making it Polestar's fastest car yet... yes, even including the magnificent and ultra-rare
Polestar 1, because the 4 is capable of a 3.8-second 0-62mph run - it's in truth this 3 which has the most advanced chassis hardware. That's because the 3 sits on the SPA2 platform, whereas the 4 is mounted on SEA and the 2 runs CMA architecture.
What this means in plainer terms is that the Polestar 3 has some fairly serious-looking specifications for various parts of its dynamic make-up. This includes double-wishbone front suspension and a multilink rear axle with an electric Torque Vectoring Dual Clutch (TVDC) set-up fitted to it, as well as twin-chamber air springs and 500Hz ZF adaptive shocks which have the ability to adjust the damper speed once every two milliseconds. The whole suspension arrangement on the 3 is self-levelling, the brakes are mighty Brembo affairs with four-piston front and single piston rear callipers gripping 400mm drilled/ventilated and 390mm ventilated discs respectively, and a decoupling function also allows the car to run solely on its front motor from time to time to save energy.
So while it's not setting itself up as particularly sporty to drive, particularly if you don't specify the Performance Pack model, the Polestar 3 is nevertheless surprisingly rewarding if you find yourself situated at its steering wheel. It keeps excellent control of its body during some quite stringent cornering provocation and while it will, eventually, resort to understeer - the one area where it feels its 2.7-tonne weight, because the 3 certainly never does with those monster Brembos handling the stopping - it takes a lot of driver ham-fistedness to get that nose-washing-out situation to arise.
Better yet is that TVDC-equipped rear axle, which you can really feel working if you're brave enough to get onto the Polestar 3's ample power mid-bend. Its clever shunting of torque to the trailing wheel which can handle it best manifests as a sensation in the small of your back, like a tiny, invisible hand is pressing into your kidneys, and while that might sound like a weird and somewhat unpleasant experience, if you're a keen driver then you'll know its one of the magic tricks of a limited-slip diff. Of course, that's not quite what the P3 has, but the way it arcs itself onto a tighter line when exiting a corner under power is fantastic. Both grip and traction are immense, too, so you can really avail of this beneficial torque-vectoring feature in warm, dry conditions.
Helped by positive, even feelsome steering, it means the Polestar 3 is no softly sprung wafter that feels all cumbersome and hefty on twisting roads. Rather, it's an enjoyable and talented electric SUV, yet thankfully it doesn't let itself down when it comes to ride comfort and rolling refinement. It's not perfect in this regard - there are times when you're aware that 22-inch alloys on 40-profile front, 35-profile rear tyres are hanging unsprung at all four corners, usually by means of audible muffled thuds and perceptible-through-your-spine thumps in the cabin, but these are rare occasions. For the vast majority of the time, the Polestar 3 is supremely comfortable and conducts itself in a dignified near-silence. So if you're not throwing it around like some kind of oversized hot hatch, it can put on a thoroughly sophisticated display while it is doing nothing more arduous than ticking off mile after mile on a long motorway cruise or similar.
Value
For now, there are just the Dual Motor twins in the Polestar 3 range, which means a starting ticket of £75,900 for a model like our test car and £81,500 for the Performance Pack-enhanced 517hp upgrade. When the Long Range Single Motor arrives, likely in 2025, it will dip below the 70-grand barrier with a £69,900 figure, but there are no plans for a Standard Range (smaller battery) variant in the Polestar 3 family which would reduce the price further, while the example we drove from Wales into the Cotswolds was a meaty £85,600 in total - thanks to the fitment of Space metallic paint (£1,000), some HD headlights (£1,600), the Charcoal animal-welfare Nappa leather upholstery and Black Ash trim inside (£5,000), and the aforementioned 22-inch wheels (£2,100). No doubt there will be the possibility to fit the same expensive options to the Single Motor model, but in the 3's defence, it's very well-equipped as standard across the board, while the price for similar electric SUVs from premium manufacturers with comparable performance and range claims is often even more expensive again than the Polestar's asking price.
Verdict
It has taken a while for Polestar to give the 2 some 'friends' in the product portfolio, but judging by the sheer brilliance of the new 3 Long Range Dual Motor SUV, it was well worth the wait. Aside from a sometimes-crunchy ride (possibly averted by sticking to the standard 21-inch wheels on the non-Performance Pack variant) and an over-reliance on the (admittedly slick) 14.5-inch touchscreen in the cabin, what you have here is a spacious, comfortable, attractive, rapid and long-legged electric family chariot with a true premium feel shot through every single thing it does. Judged like that, it's hard to conclude anything other than the wonderful Polestar 3 is a terrific success.
