I already knew a lot about the Polestar 3 from watching lots of YouTube videos of it, reading about it, working with the online Polestar configurator, and of course sitting in one a couple of months ago. But driving it, seeing it outdoors, and seeing the software first-hand is very different. From the time it was first shown to journalists, with resultant YouTube reviews, I’ve agreed with Jonny Smith in his assessment that it’s less an SUV and more like the Polestar equivalent of the Volvo Cross Country wagon; indeed, the low external roof height is almost identical to that of a V70 Cross Country wagon (like my own). As I’m a wagon guy and not so keen on SUVs, this is something that attracted me from the start to the Polestar 3, and it doesn’t hurt that the exterior design is really excellent to my eye. It also helps that Polestar has now produced a lower trim to order on their online configurator that has 20-inch wheels (much better than 21- or 22-inch wheels for a host of reasons including range) with a starting MSRP of around $73k USD, which makes it eligible for the US federal tax credit of $7500 once it’s made in Charleston (later this year) — making it a $65k car, essentially, and much more attractive.
I had also been turned off by the Tesla-like interior that is so anti-luxury and anti-driver — a move that Polestar and Volvo have sadly been heading toward for years now. As I have said numerous times, Polestar is comparing their new cars to Porsches, and that comparison is ironic given that Porsche makes the best cockpits in the auto industry (to me as an avid driver who would rather drive across the US than fly, and does so) whereas Tesla makes the absolute worst cockpits. Even Porsche, which had put climate controls into a touchscreen in their Taycan, has heard the cries of their customers and put back physical climate-control switches in their Macan BEV (and in all new Porsche ICEVs and PHEVs, too, where they had gone in recent years to wildly unpopular haptic-push/touch controls). From the photos and videos, and sitting in a pre-production car in the Polestar showroom a couple of months ago, I was prepared for crappy cockpit design for my test drive yesterday — but it was worse than I expected, as I’ll explain.
First, the salesman called me less than an hour before my reserved time for my test drive to tell me he had just taken another customer out on a test drive in the same Polestar 3, and the screen had gone dead. He suggested that I come back another day because he’d been unable to reboot the car’s computer/screen, but I insisted on coming because I wanted to see what it was like without the screen working (of course!) and he said it was still driveable but the driver couldn’t adjust anything (seats, steering wheel, outside mirrors, climate, headlights, drive mode, etc., were all dead because they’re only in the touchscreen). I was eager to see how bad it was! “Fortunately”, he kept trying while I drove to the dealership and was finally able to reboot the system so that the infotainment screen was working when I sat in it. There was no failure of the computer system while I sat in it for over an hour, but there were software glitches — one being that we got the front passenger window down but couldn’t get it to go back up again (he said he’d reboot it again later after I left to hopefully get that window up).
That brings me to one of the “brain farts” in terms of interior design: they went from the standard four buttons to open and close each of the four door windows to three buttons in the Polestar 3: two forward buttons to open and close each side window, and a third button just behind those two for swapping between the front and rear windows. Anybody would instantly think how stupid an idea this is — making things unnecessarily complicated — but it was worse than I even expected. It seemed that the third button didn’t work all the time, as I was testing it, and I kept having problems with a rear window going down or up when I intended the front window to do so, and vice versa … and then the right front window went down and wouldn’t come back up. (Curiously, the Polestar 4 in the showroom has gone back to 4 window switches on the driver side!)
Adjusting the side mirrors is done in a very awkward way: first you have to go into the infotainment screen into a sub-sub menu to select left or right mirror with a touch icon, and then you have to use the buttons on the right side of the steering wheel to move the mirrors up/down or in/out. The moving of the mirrors and the sub-sub menu were both glitchy. I never could figure out what the left-side buttons on the steering wheel do, though I tried (with the salesman gone after our test drive). None of the buttons on the steering wheel are labeled, so it’s all just a guessing crap shoot. As is so horrible in our present-day Volvos, the instrument panel is not very configurable — only three or four possible “looks”, one of which has a tiny Google map in the middle (because unlike in our present-day Volvos, the instrument screen is really small). You can only see the odometer in the instrument panel once you open the door (i.e., “turn off the car”), and the odometer is buried in a sub-menu of the infotainment screen, so it’s not a full-time thing (another stupid carry-over from Volvo).
I could not find any diagrams showing power to axles (again a Volvo-like omission). Also a bad carry-over from Volvo, there’s no diagram to show tire pressure in each tire in the Polestar 3. Again, curiously, the Polestar 4 does have such a diagram in the infotainment screen, showing tire pressure in psi (or other units) for each tire. Sounds like Polestar HQ is listening to (potential) customer complaints — unlike Volvo, which doesn’t seem to care. Maybe Polestar will put four driver-door window switches back into the Polestar 3 in the near future? Also, again way too much shiny “piano black” surfaces in the center console of the P3 (together with the horrible fingerprints that you get on all touchscreens). When will automakers learn to never put shiny “piano black” surfaces in car interiors, and go for matte-black surfaces instead?! Again, it seems that 100% of the public (and journalists) hate fingerprint-prone and solar-glare-prone shiny black (or chrome) surfaces on the interior; it’s like interior car designers don’t actually do much real-world driving.
In the Polestar 3, the wiper stalk is on the left side of the car, which doubles as a turn-signal stalk. The right-side stalk is for drive mode (D, N, R, with P on the end of the stalk). That’ll take some getting used to. No headlight switches; they are all in the infotainment screen … the setting was on “Auto” for headlights, so I suppose that’s ok, but I’m not sure how you can manually put on the bright lights (didn’t check). Another stupid thing is that you have to go into a sub-sub menu to open the glovebox via a touch icon — which didn’t work in the Polestar 3 that I was in yesterday. Is it really that hard to put a switch on the glovebox?! The rear tail gate would not open from the outside, using what I assume was the button below to open it; but it did open with a touch-icon button next to the glovebox icon in the sub-sub menu.
The car has a lot of space for both leg room and cargo, especially with the rear seats down. The rear headrests are huge and really cut out a chunk of the rear window via the rear-view mirror for the driver. Unlike in my ’22 XC60, there’s no apparent icon in the sub-sub menu to electronically fold the rear-seat headrests, but when I got out to put down the rear seats for better visibility during my test drive, I realized that the headrests had folded automatically, and sure enough, after I got back, I put up the back seats and the headrests remained down. So that’s a plus. The rear window isn’t bad — it has good up-down (vertical) visibility; it’s the side-ways (horizontal) view that isn’t great because the posts at the rear are so thick and huge. But coming from Porsches, I didn’t feel that the view out the back window was bad at all. Again, a pet peeve that I have to mention as a horrific omission in all cars that don’t have it: no Polestar appears to have dual sun visors for both front seats — a huge safety issue. (Our 1992 Ford Explorer even had dual sun visors, as do Porsche Cayennes and Mercedes 450s today.)
The seats are very nice — both in texture and in comfort. I don’t like the one-switch control on the side of the seat; it seemed finicky as I tried to get the seat to where I wanted it. You also have to go into the infotainment screen for heating, ventilating, lumbar, massaging, etc. Nice storage scattered around, including an area underneath the center console where there are also USB ports (I didn’t check to see if you can use any of them for running my flashdrive with music, as I can in almost all cars today — meant to but forgot.) There’s a big, deep storage bin under the center armrest in front (with a convenient inside light but no USB or power ports inside). The doors are very thick/solid and impressive. Nice inside materials all around except for the plastic “piano black” surfaces here and there, which are of course crap and cheap-looking (and look very out-of-place in a car like this).
You get two key cards (no more key fobs), and the salesman made a huge deal about using my phone to access my car — something I refuse to do, as I don’t want to use my phone for such things, let alone that almost all automaker phone apps suck. He told me that the car unlocks automatically as I approach the car with the key card, locks automatically when I leave the car with the key card (it wouldn’t), and start up automatically when I sat in the car seat with the key card (it seemed on when I opened the door, so am not sure the difference). As a person who likes to know and control when a car locks/unlocks and is turned on or off, I’m not sure how readily I’ll adapt to such “features”. When I showed him that the car didn’t lock despite my being 100 feet away from it with the key card, he took the key card up to the door handle and tapped on it to lock/unlock it. I guess that you never have to replace batteries in a key card, but I wonder if any magnetic disturbance could render is useless permanently or temporarily (I’m guessing “yes”); I think of how often my hotel key cards go “bad” and have to be returned for “resetting” or to get a new key card. Oddly, there are two physical buttons atop the rear hatch (inside, when it’s open): a left one to just close the hatch electronically, and the right one to do so and lock the car. The right one didn’t work in the Polestar 3 yesterday, but the left button did work. This is the only place I could see a physical door-lock button anywhere in the Polestar 3. To their credit, there’s now in the infotainment sub-menu an option to turn off the car automatically locking the car doors when the car starts to move, and it does work. 
The turn signal, which is on the left stalk along with the windshield wiper, seemed finicky to me. I kept turning it on and it wouldn’t go off… I imagine seeing lots of Polestar 3 cars going down the road with their turn signals on for long periods. He did emphasize that I was in a pre-production car, but it looks pretty ready. He said he’s got 16 Polestar 3 cars coming in, all from China, for customers, and that USA-made Polestar 3s will come by year’s end.
There is a large volume-control dial and on-off push botton physical feature in the center console. That’s a plus, I guess. But as I’ve said in Volvo threads on the Google OS, I wish that such a dial would instead be used to zoom in or out of Google Maps (or, like in Mercedes, move around the infotainment screen without having to touch it while driving). There’s just so many other vastly better design systems out there than Volvo/Polestar (and Tesla) have, and I wish that Volvo/Polestar HQ would adopt more from the best systems and stop adopting the worst features (which are all well summed up in Teslas, and sadly also in Volvos and Polestars now). The Mercedes 450e has a nifty trackpad in the center console for moving around the infotainment screen without having to touch the screen, and selecting things; it can be a little quirky, but it’s a lot more creative and useful than anything Volvo/Polestar have done. Almost all other automakers including “lowly” Toyota have more configurable and handy/useful instrument panels than Volvo/Polestar do today, and that’s beyond frustrating. If I’m a Polestar/Volvo CEO, I’m going to direct my design department to make the best cockpit by looking at what everybody else does well and poorly — that means looking closely at the decent jobs by Mercedes, BMW, Porsche, Lucid, Cadillac, Honda, Jaguar, Kia/Hyundai, etc., and at the horrible jobs done by Tesla, Ford, VW, and now Volvo/Polestar … You can do much better, Polestar/Volvo!!!
There is apparently ambient lighting in the Polestar 3, with planetary themes (Sun, Mercury-Neptune), which is kinda cool. The screens are very crisp, like an iPad. But again, I don’t want a cheap interior with an iPad glued to dashboard in a $70k or $80k car; I want my screens nicely embedded into the dashboard like Porsche and so many other automakers still are able to do in their BEVs. And I especially do not want Tesla-like stupid electronic/receding door handles; I want regular, normal door handles, like everybody else does (everybody = 100% of the public). I wish Polestar would save money for themselves and the customer by offering an all-metal roof — better range, anyway. I sat in the back seat on a sunny day, and found the sun to be very glary even with the tinted glass overhead. Polestar is offering now a manually installed glass cover for the ceiling for $180 or whatever — not sure how finicky that might be to use in practice. Just give me a metal roof, please.
The computer was estimating about 300-320 miles of range based on how my test-drive Polestar 3 had been driven; it had about 300 miles on the odometer and had about 50% of battery charge left, range predicted was 150 miles. I enjoyed driving the Polestar 3. It handles really well. I was in one-pedal driving the whole time by preference (as I drive in my ’22 XC60 T8 ER). Volvo/Polestar do one-pedal driving really well — much better than Tesla does. I got lots of looks when stopped at traffic lights from other drivers — the Polestar 3 is indeed unique in appearance, and in a good way.
Final thoughts overall: this is a great-looking car inside and out except for the cockpit (which sucks). I’m still on the fence with buying this (vs. buying a Macan 4 as my first BEV, after having owned now three PHEVs). In addition to having much more in the way of practical and safe physical switches/dials, and having a far-superior cockpit design, the Macan 4 has 800-volt architecture and can charge faster and go further than can the Polestar 3. The inside of the Macan looks better than the Polestar 3 does, as well. But the exterior of the Macan BEV is horrible, and the Polestar 3 beats it handily there. I think that the Polestar 3 also beats the Macan 4 in interior cargo and seating space.
The Polestar 4 is a no-go with the lack of a rear window — even though it has some good features that the Polestar 3 lacks (as noted above). The Polestar 4 screens are like the Polestar 3 cockpit screens. The rear seat of the Polestar 4 has ambient lighting — purple behind the rear seats in the showroom car, reminding me of the rear of a limo. The computer screens were working “sorta”; the Google Maps would not display. The rear-view mirror in the Polestar 4 is a digital view out the rear using an outside rear camera; we all know what could go wrong there (aside from the fact that the eye has to re-focus from looking at infinity out the front windshield to a computer-screen image in the rear-view mirror at very close distance): mud/dirt/snow/ice on the rear camera lens; computer failure of the screen, leaving you with no way to see behind you. My computer glitches in my XC60 and the failure of the computer in the Polestar 3 yesterday is a wake-up call to leave lots of analogue things in cars (like physical switches/dials for anything important while driving, and a rear window). Polestar has been doing a superb job of exterior design of their cars — better across the board than any other automaker that I can think of for BEVs. Where Polestar fails is in their cockpit design, and also now their door-handle design for the new Polestar models, and in their charging internal engineering design (they should be at 800 volts by now, as should Volvo). If Polestar wants to save money, don’t do it with voltage/architecture or physical buttons/dials; do it with all-metal roofs, normal door handles, smaller wheels, normal steel suspension, and base sound systems. Make air suspension, glass roofs, larger wheels, beefed-up sound systems, etc., optional, not standard.
Some photos below from yesterday.