Polestar 5 prototype review

With Lotus Elise-style construction, a super-thin battery and little chassis electrickery, this could be a purist’s Porsche Taycan, writes Ilya Verpraet

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The new Polestar 5 is an engineer’s dream come true. Whereas previous Polestars have all been based on a platform shared with other Geely group products, this sports saloon was effectively a clean-sheet design.

WHAT'S IT LIKE?

As a result, it isn’t just another platform-sharing EV with stupid power (although it does have up to 872bhp, because it’s still the way these things are done). It's based on its own Polestar Performance Architecture, which, unusually, is a bonded extruded aluminium chassis. While there are still plenty of shared electrical bits, this allowed Polestar to go all out, without the compromises and limiting factors that usually come with a shared platform.

A bonded extruded aluminium chassis in itself is nothing new. It has most famously underpinned many Lotuses since the Elise, and other low-volume sports car makers have it. Low volume is key here, because the Polestar 5 represents the first time a volume model is built this way.

The engineers say there’s no one innovation to make this possible; Polestar is just in the ideal place to try it. The compromise of this method is that it makes each car pricier to make, but the tooling is very cheap compared with the huge stamping machines that churn out steel unibody parts. Thus it would be uneconomical to produce a Toyota Corolla this way, but as long as the volumes don’t get too enormous, it could turn out cheaper. In addition, it affords the flexibility to change things, as modifying the tooling isn’t prohibitively expensive.

The 5 being a kind of standalone car performance car meant it presented the perfect opportunity. The platform gives it the required stiffness, and it will ultimately be used in other cars, most imminently the Polestar 6 roadster — but while conversations were had with Lotus, the Geely siblings decided to go their own ways.