Taking the new Polestar 3 SUV for a spin on the icy roads of Lapland
Swedish-Chinese EV brand Polestar developed its new SUV in the Arctic Circle and so we strap in for an unforgettable drive on snowbound roads and frozen lakes.
I’m sure the friendly Swedish man is trying to be reassuring, it’s just that he’s really very bad at it, and every time he opens his mouth it gets worse.
“There’s really nothing to worry about because there’s almost no one on the roads,” he begins, waving his arms vaguely, as if to distract us from looking at the roads he’s talking about, which are covered in what looks like the fondant atop a Christmas cake.
“Well, it will be slippery, yes, and there are patches that are very icy, so you should be careful of that.” (Long pause, refusal to make eye contact.) “Yes, good to be very careful.
“Oh, and then, when you get closer to Jokkmokk, there will be quite a lot of reindeer. And they might be close to the road. Or on it.
“Yes. And then there are moose. They’re much bigger than the reindeer. Look out for them. Yes. Well, good luck.”
And with that, the helpful fellow from Polestar – a Swedish-Chinese EV brand that chooses to test and develop its cars in the Arctic Circle, not only for cultural reasons but because its engineers believe that any car that can survive the kind of punishment this unique environment offers will be able to succeed anywhere on the planet.
It’s only after he’s left that we realise the Polestar 2 he’s given us at the snowbound Luleå Airport for our journey further into the frozen north is the entry-level, rear-drive version. Normally I prefer RWD cars, but it did feel like either an oversight or slightly obtuse Scando humour not to give us the more expensive and inherently safer dual-motor version.
Fortunately, what we do have to tackle a road surface that resembles an ice rink that’s been attacked by several logging trucks and then lightly sprinkled with a mixture of danger and evil, are studded winter tyres.
In most conditions these tyres – which are obligatory in Sweden during the winter months, but banned at other times because of the damage they can do to the road surface – provide surprising levels of grip. Unfortunately, the word “most” is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
Normally, I am not what you would call a careful driver, and I’m certainly not one of those tentative, clearly frightened old ninnies I shout about when I’m stuck behind one, but after the Polestar 2 fishtailed sideways through the very first roundabout I’d slowly and carefully entered, I began to drive like someone from Canberra (slowly, and scared of traffic).
I learned to drive in a hot country, so the sight of a highway with no visible line markings and one of the two lanes completely covered in slippery looking ice, is the stuff of heart palpitations. Even in the clearer lane, where traffic provides tracks, there’s a streak of ice between your wheels that feels it could slip you at any moment. And to add to the thrills, each time you face an oncoming large truck, it creates an ice cloud so intense that the world disappears entirely for a few seconds.
Attempting to pull out of an intersection too quickly provides another moment of wheel spinning, sideways slip and squealing from the Polestar’s occupants. It’s fair to say that I have never driven so far, for so long under the speed limit, nor have I ever been so grateful for the technical wizardry that is traction control.
All of the nervous moments are worth it, of course, for the stark, staggering views of a sugar-white landscape filled with gingerbread houses and strafed by the pinky-purple palette of the all-day dawn light of late winter. The sun seems magnetised to the horizon, taking hours to creep up and then barely clearing the tree line as it strolls across the sky, seemingly producing no heat at all.
It was minus 40°C just a few days before we arrived in tiny Jokkmokk – which sits inside the Arctic Circle – so our Polestar hosts apparently aren’t joking about how lucky we are that it’s a clear day and “only” minus 20°C as we head out to the frozen lake where engineers have spent dark, miserable months testing and retesting and fiddling and fettling the company’s new SUV.
These people are seriously passionate about what they do; you’d have to be to work up here. Their commitment to creating fun, feisty EVs is perhaps best encapsulated by something Andreas Andreen, project manager for Polestar 3, says: “If you don’t want to take a detour on the way home, you’re driving the wrong car.”
The new 3 is a much better-looking car than previous Polestar efforts, which is an achievement when you consider the previous models were sedans and this one is a competitor for the likes of bulky machines such as the BMW iX and Porsche’s Cayenne. It has “aero blades”, whatever they are, a future-cool front end and an overall sleek and low-lying look.
It doesn’t just look low, either, because it’s been designed with a focus on performance driving, so the 3 has a centre of gravity that’s the same as a Polestar sedan, a perfect 50-50 weight balance and an ingenious new torque-vectoring system that sends power to the outside rear wheel when you’re cornering, to push you through the bend.
One of the bonuses of doing much of your testing on twisting tracks cut into a frozen lake, aside from how much fun it is if you’re a driving enthusiast, is that everything happens in slow motion. As an engineer explains to me, this means that when a vehicle loses traction, it gives them plenty of time to see how and where it’s happening, and to calibrate the software and hardware to cope. The result is a Polestar 3 that feels wonderfully close to idiot-proof.
After a few laps slipping and sliding a gentle amount with the traction control on, I feel confident enough to let rip with the system off. This allows this two-tonne-plus family car to power slide like a rally car, and provides me with the hugely entertaining sensation of being so constantly sideways that I steer by looking out the side windows rather than the windscreen.
Even when I stuff up and go too far, which happens a lot, the traction nanny is still there, still clever enough to just gently nudge me back into line.
The problems I’d had with getting the power down in the Polestar 2 on slick roads yesterday should be much worse here on slick ice – it’s actually almost harder to walk on than it is to drive on – because the 3 is far more torque tough, producing 910Nm and 380kW in Performance guise. Fortunately, it is delivered through two electric motors, one on each axle, which provides the considerable benefits of all-wheel drive, but the torque-vectoring system, along with the car’s inherent balance, helps a lot as well.
After an unforgettable couple of days in Jokkmokk, we jump back in the rear-drive Polestar 2 on a day where the weather is even worse to head back south and really put our bodies to the test with a stop at Arctic Bath, a beautiful spa facility. This is a place of strange self-torture, where you plunge your body into a pool of water that was ice that morning and freezes every night. Water so cold it comes perilously close to stopping your heart before you leap, nay fly, out of it and run for the nearby sauna or hot tub. The resulting temperature change makes your skin feel more tingling than an acid shower, but it is also more pleasant. Enlivening even.
We finish off with a stop at the nearby Treehotel, where we marvel at rooms hidden in trees and designed to look like bird’s nests, UFOs and even a box made entirely of mirrors, reflecting the snow-heavy trees around. A stay for someone seeking self-reflection, clearly.
Strangely, happily, I feel far less scared of the roads on the way back to the airport, although still not confident enough to attempt many overtaking manoeuvres. After mastering the art of drifting on ice and snow I feel a little bit Swedish (their licence system involves compulsory time driving on low-grip surfaces), and almost welcome those inevitable moments of tail-happy sliding, so I can catch them like a pro, or a local. Truly, though, of all the countries I’ve ever driven in, and all the conditions I’ve endured, none have been as uniquely challenging, and unforgettable, as a lap of Lapland.
POLESTAR 3
Engine: Dual electric motors
Power: 380kW
Torque: 910Nm
Transmission: Single-speed automatic, all-wheel drive
Price: $141,900
This story is from the June issue of WISH.
