Expansively spacious, expensively hewn and characteristically minimalist in its layout and themes, the swish cabin of the Polestar 3 has an understated but undeniably pervasive appeal.
This is a determinedly 21st-century car that embraces digital tech as fulsomely as any other. It comes not with a key but, like a Tesla, a credit card-style access card without any buttons for unlocking or opening the boot remotely (which can be annoying when passengers reach the vehicle first). To unlock it, hold that key card against the door handle (or just leave it in your pocket and press the handle’s ‘keyless’ dimple), which then motors outwards towards your fingers.
Getting in is easy and will require no step up for most occupants. And, just as the designers intended, the sense of space inside isn’t diminished by any meaningful lack of head room. Sparsely featured consoles extend before you and to either side, but high material quality makes those fairly bare expanses appealing to the senses all the same.
Usefully sized glovebox and armrest storage areas make up for door bins that are slimmer and less accessible than some, with more space for bags and wallets available underneath the floating centre console.
The car’s primary and secondary controls are well located; there is both a small digital instrument screen and a large head-up display to relay key driving information right where you would want it; and the 3’s front seats are comfortable and widely adjustable, so it’s easy to feel at home at the wheel.
Adjusting the steering column, however, involves diving into the central, portrait-oriented touchscreen multimedia system and wading through a couple of menus until the slightly mysterious unmarked buttons on the steering wheel spokes are empowered as controls for the motorised column. Thus you are given a first taste of a secondary control concept that is conspicuously short on fixed physical switchgear and which relies heavily on the central screen, even for things like fog-lamp activation, mirror adjustment, intermittent wiper speed and glovebox opening (see ‘Multimedia’).
Just as Volvo did with the EX30, Polestar may claim fewer switches and secondary components make for a more sustainable interior. But that argument didn’t convince us as a good reason to make a car harder to operate 12 months ago, and still doesn’t today.
Boot space is good, however. The sloping roofline does make it a bit shallow towards the back of the car, but the 484-litre space (accessed through a usefully large hatch aperture) is decent, with a nifty boot floor that folds up to split the load space and gives you something to strap your groceries securely to (as we have seen in various Volvos). Meanwhile, the small ‘frunk’ is good for storing a single charging cable under the car’s bonnet.
Multimedia – 3 stars
The 14.5in, portrait-oriented multimedia system is supposedly backed by enough networked processing power to make this car and the related Volvo EX90 among the market’s first ‘software-defined vehicles’, capable of updating and improving themselves over time. This sounds like it should make for the most sophisticated, responsive and intuitive touchscreen system of its kind, but the reality, commendable as it is in some ways, doesn’t quite live up to that billing.
The system is navigated through a row of shortcuts at the base of the screen, some of which are selected ‘intelligently’ according to the menus and functions you most commonly access. These can make bringing up the car’s efficiency computer simpler, for example, but they don’t seem able to put particular ADAS or drive mode toggles permanently on display – and so you regularly have to go three or four levels deep into the menus, looking away from the road for longer, to find things that ought to be more accessible.
The system is well rendered, its menu icons typically of a size that’s easy to hit at arm’s length, but it does suffer with moments of latency that can frustrate you, for instance, when trying to disable lane keeping on a winding road. It has good Google-based voice control but no physical cursor controller.