How Polestar Balances Fun and Predictability to Make Its EVs a Pleasure to Drive

Designing a car is never a simple task. Let the car do too much for the driver, and you’re going to turn off a whole slew of enthusiasts. Make it too responsive, and no one is going to want it as their daily driver. The beauty of modern technology, though, means this balance is easier to achieve than ever before, and the 2023 Polestar 2 is a perfect example.

I had a chance to take a Polestar 2 out to the snow-covered track at Circuit Mécaglisse in Québec, where I was able to see firsthand just how much thought went into making the vehicle appeal to as many people as possible. I wanted to know more about how engineers and designers weigh the needs of enthusiasts and everyday drivers when working on a new vehicle.

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In a former life, Joakim Rydholm was a winning rally driver in largely Scandinavian championships. Now, he’s Polestar’s chief chassis engineer, which means he has the pleasure of pushing cars to their limits to create the ideal balance of handling and predictability.

“Tuning a chassis on snow and ice allows us to develop our cars in what feels like slow motion and with better accuracy,” Rydholm said. “With such low levels of grip, we can feel and analyze the dynamics at a much slower pace than on tarmac, which means we can really fine -tune the way our cars behave, down to the smallest details.”

The kind of driving Rydholm did in his rally career would likely terrify the average driver, but Christian Samson, Polestar’s head of product attributes, credits Rydholm’s high-adrenaline driving style as an important part of the design process.

“You have to discover how the car behaves when you lose the car,” Samson told Jalopnik. “This would scare a customer, provoking the car like this. But we can analyze backwards and discover what lost the balance.”