The 2025 Polestar 4: Great steering and a small carbon footprint stand out

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"If you're going to make a car and use all that energy, it should be a good car," said Thomas Ingenlath, CEO of Polestar. Ingenlath was referring to the company's latest electric vehicle, a midsize SUV with striking coupe looks called the Polestar 4. While Ingenlath is on point from a sustainability perspective, it makes good business sense, too. The Polestar 4 needs to be a good car to stand out as it enters one of the most hotly contested segments of the market.

In fact, Polestar uses less energy to make its latest EV than anything else in its range—the company quotes a carbon footprint of 19.9 tonnes of CO₂ from cradle to gate. Like some other automakers, Polestar is using a monomaterial approach to the interior to make recycling easier, choosing the same base plastic for all the components in a particular piece of trim, for example.

The carpets are made from, variously, recycled fishing nets or plastic bottles. The vinyl seats use pine oil instead of the stuff extracted from the ground, and the knitted upholstery fabric—also recycled plastic bottles—was designed to leave no off-cuts.

The fastest Polestar yet

In addition to being the greenest Polestar so far, this one is also the most performant. We tested the $62,900 Long Range Dual Motor version, which can send up to 536 hp (400 kW) and 506 lb-ft (686 Nm) to the wheels. Pick this version and you should see 270 miles (434 km) from the 100 kWh battery pack. In a suitable location like a motorway toll booth, 60 mph arrives in 3.7 seconds (100 km/h in 3.8).

That's if you're in performance mode, at least. Switch to range mode, and clutches disconnect the front permanent magnet synchronous motor and remap the throttle pedal for better efficiency. There's also a heat pump as standard. The car can DC fast-charge at rates of up to 200 kW, which should take the battery pack from 10 to 80 percent state of charge in 30 min. At home on an 11 kW AC charger, 0–100 percent SoC should take about 11 hours.

There is also a Long Range Single Motor variant with precisely half the power and torque but an EPA range of 300 miles (482 km). Driven by just its rear wheels, the Polestar 4 has more modest performance—60 mph arrives in 6.9 seconds, 100 km/h in 7.1—but it also carries a $8,000-cheaper price, starting at $54,900. New tariffs on Chinese-made EVs have come into effect, but Polestar told Ars that it is sticking with the original pricing. Next year, production of US-market Polestar 4s will begin in South Korea, which will mean significantly smaller import tariffs. (This story originally stated there had been a $10,000 price increase; this was incorrect.)

A white Polestar 4 in a field, seen from the rear 3/4 — Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

It’s surprisingly good to drive

It has to be said: Making an electric car go fast is not particularly difficult. Electric motors generate most of their torque almost immediately, and unlike with a combustion motor, if you increase the peak power, there isn't really an efficiency hit lower down the performance envelope. So even a 3-ton monster can get hurled down the road rapidly enough to embarrass a whole lot of supercars.

The Polestar 4 isn't quite that heavy—5,192 lbs (2,355 kg)—so it forgoes air suspension in favor of conventional coil springs and dampers. These are passive in the Single Motor, but the Dual Motor is equipped with active dampers as standard, and if you choose the performance pack, it's upgraded with stiffer springs and antiroll bars and new damper tuning.

Our test car was so equipped, and it was a noticeably firm ride, particularly when sitting in the back. There was also a bit of wind noise at speed, but more tire roar, thanks presumably to the performance pack's 22-inch wheels.

But you don't really care about that from the driver's seat. That's because Polestar has managed to imbue its latest car with something all too rare in 2024—steering feel. News of the road surface conditions reach your hands via the wheel, a useful trait on a twisty road in mixed conditions.

The infotainment screen of a Polestar 4 — Note the wide-angle view from the rear camera. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

And were I driving a Polestar 4, I would most certainly take the long and windy route home. It's plenty quick in range mode and feels properly fast in performance. Like the steering, the brakes offer some feel and aren't artificial. It doesn't coast as well as other EVs; I found I preferred driving it in one-pedal mode on the highway as well as in the city or on a back road.

No rear window will be controversial

Polestar wanted a sleek look for the 4 while still keeping room inside for four adults on board. To do that, the design team lowered the nose and the roofline and made the bold choice to ditch the rear window, reasoning that the heads of anyone sitting in the back would obscure that view anyway.

Instead, the rearview mirror is the camera kind. The technology is highly mature now—it went into use in cars like the Chevrolet Bolt almost a decade ago and is dependable enough for 200 mph race cars as well as commercial vans. At first, the different focal point can be a little disconcerting if you've only ever used a reflective mirror, but this soon goes away, particularly if you're not hopping back and forth between different cars all the time.

You also have far more freedom in where you position the mirror since there's no need for direct line of sight—that's handled by the camera mounted above the tailgate. So not only do you get a wider field of view than a normal mirror, but you can orient the display so that you take in that information without taking your eyes as far off the road as you would in a more conventional car.

Polestar 4, the view from the rear seat — A glass roof is standard, electrochromic dimming is an option. Credit: Jonathan Gitlin

The benefit in terms of rear space is real—there's plenty of headroom in the back, even with the reclining seats in their most upright position.

Software still needs some work

The first Polestar 4 deliveries aren't scheduled until the end of this year, which means there should be ample time to iron out the bugs we experienced with the pre-production software. As with other Polestars, the touchscreen-based infotainment system uses a Polestar UX/UI layer on top of Android Automotive OS.

Like the exterior styling, it's recognizably Polestar, but it's also subtly different from the other cars in the range. There are only four font sizes, and the text is always left-aligned. Instead of text-heavy lists, there are big graphical icons, and there's a split-screen mode that lets you display Google Maps on one side and user-defined widgets on the other.

But a touchscreen needs to be completely reliable if it's the sole interaction method for a car. And unfortunately, the 15.4-inch touchscreen in our test Polestar 4 was too reluctant to process a finger tap on too many occasions for me to be happy with it.

Assuming that gets fixed, I think Polestar has a very compelling new product on its hands, and it may even tempt more than a few away from the electric Porsche Macan.

Listing image: Jonathan Gitlin

Jonathan M. Gitlin Automotive Editor

Jonathan is the Automotive Editor at Ars Technica. He has a BSc and PhD in Pharmacology. In 2014 he decided to indulge his lifelong passion for the car by leaving the National Human Genome Research Institute and launching Ars Technica's automotive coverage. He lives in Washington, DC.

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