There are a lot of electric carmakers. There are a lot of electric crossovers. If Sino-Swedish carmaker Polestar is one of those brands you just casually forget about it’s kinda hard to blame you. Now look at a picture of the 884 horsepower, all-electric Polestar 6 and try not to care. I dare you.
It’s not that the Polestar cars are bad. They’re subtle and understated. Unfortunately, subtle and understated isn’t going to work in a universe where your competition is launching their electric sports cars into space. Enter the Polestar 6.
If this car looks familiar to you, it’s because the Polestar 6 is the name given to the Polestar O2, a concept that Polestar revealed in Los Angeles back in March. The vehicle presented here looks to be the same as it was back then. Look closely and you’ll even see a script on the side that says Polestar 02. It still looks rather fantastic with its plus sign wheels, sculpted, but not overdone bodywork, and sloping roofline.
While the car itself appears to still be in concept form, we are given some details about what’s under that sleek hardtop convertible skin.
Polestar says that the vehicle will be built on the company’s bonded aluminum platform, which is the same platform that underpins the Polestar 5. That also means an 800-Volt, dual-motor all-wheel drive powertrain that was announced for the Polestar 5 back in June.
Those dual motors offer an up to 884 hp and 663 lb-ft torque punch. That translates to a 60 mph acceleration time of just 3.2 seconds and a top speed of 155 mph. And of course, you get to do that with the wind blowing through your hair.
Polestar is holding further details close to the chest for now. But it does say that there will be 500 units of a special edition produced. The Polestar 6 LA Concept edition will get the sky blue exterior of the Polestar O2 concept, those sweet 21-inch wheels, and a light leather interior. Pricing hasn’t been revealed, but Polestar says that more information will become available closer to the vehicle’s 2026 launch.
If you’re going to Monterey Car Week in California this week, you’ll be able to see the Polestar O2 concept car. It’ll be at Pebble Beach Concours d’Elegance and ‘The Quail, A Motorsports Gathering’ August 18 through 21.
[Image credits: Polestar]
If you crash the car with the crosses on the wheels, do you get thrown out of church? Or burnt at the stake? And what do the Jews and Muslims drive?
Only a communist Chinese marketing dept would have allowed those crosses out in public. Surprised they do not have a LED Jesus in the middle to catch the Kitch catholic market…
Shitty title forces me to make an account just to tell you off.
You could say I was forced to give a shit about it, Merc
This may be a prime vehicle to replace my M4 convertible in a handful of years. My wife and I are going fully electric with her next car and I’d love to go electric with mine as well. We love convertibles (hardtop only) and need the back seats for our dogs. The Tesla Roadster would be a decent option but who knows if and when that’ll actually come out and what kind of nonsense Tesla will have done with it. If the Polestar 6 looks like this and is a 2+2 hardtop convertible, there’s a solid chance it’ll be in my garage in the future.
I just don’t even know where to begin to start criticizing the looks of this car… maybe the heinous wheel design?
I already gave a shit about Polestar…
Me too. I daily a subtle and understated Golf R and I would daily a subtle and understated Polestar if I didn’t park on the street. Spent 10 minutes yesterday asking a guy how much he liked the one he was parking. He did, a lot.
This is a really great looking car. It definitely has the northern European minimalism in the details that enhance the appeal of the general shape. Definitely classier than other sports cars on the road now.
I always appreciate the lack of gaudy scoops and fake vents that lead nowhere, so I hope that each vent and scoop is functional and has a real purpose. If not, my interest in and opinion of this car will evaporate. I’m already not thrilled by the black areas in the corners of the bumper in front of the wheels.
An electric convertible is long overdue. Even an expensive one.
I’ve been waiting for an affordable electric convertible, preferably in an aluminum bodied car. This isn’t built for me only because I’m sure it’s not in my current price range, but it gets me excited again for what is eventually coming. (It also renews my excitement about my own fledgling business venture, with dreams of being able to affording this by the time it’s actually here.)
I feel you, but I also feel like the Polestar 6 is trying to look a lot more svelte than it actually is. Those blacked-out side skirts are a classic move to make a car look like less of a chunker, and in this case they’re very heavy-handed. I dunno, maybe it’ll look less blatant in person.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with this car, but nothing all that new either. The styling is nice, but a bit bulky with the passenger compartment sat atop that nice thick slice of battery, and I can’t imagine the chassis dynamics are all too interesting with the skateboard either. All these absurd 0-60 times have made horsepower figures meaningless, and a roadster is really not the type of car that will benefit that much from crazy straight-line speed. I’d be far more impressed by an electric roadster that moves the battery out of the floor to allow the passengers to sit lower, uses new battery tech to reduce weight instead of increasing range/power, and makes 2-300 horsepower instead. Use lighter weight to improve city efficiency, keep a small low-geared motor to give it fizzy corner exit and shape battery packs like either an engine in the front or rear, a spine frame like an MGB, or pontoons like a Ford GT to bring the cab down, making it look and feel more sporty. The skateboard makes electric sports cars look like a bodykit mounted on a body-on-frame sedan. Hudson didn’t squeeze the cabin down between the frame rails in the early 50s just so we’d raise it back up over the frame 70 years later.
Update: Rimac already has a perfect combination of the spine frame and rear-mid bulkhead battery packaging, so we know it’s entirely doable. We don’t need thousand-horsepower carbon fiber hypercars in order to use good packaging.
Polestar was already the EV I’d buy if I could, so this just a bonus.
Meh. I don’t feel at all forced to like this. I like roadsters. I have a roadster. I like Volvos. I have a Volvo. This leaves me as cold as the icy-blue of the concept. Overstyled, oversized, overpriced, and overpowered.
I have liked the Polestar line up in general.
If I were going to go EV, these are contenders. Not the roadster, rather the sedans.
I will my opinions about other brands to myself as to not start a lynch mob at my house.
All other complaints aside, this thing is gorgeous. The proportions are fantastic, I love the side profile, the face is sharp and sporty without being angry and aggressive, it looks great with top up and top down… sign me up for this if it was 1/10th of the price, lol.
“Now look at a picture of the 884 horsepower, all-electric Polestar 6 and try not to care. I dare you.”
Challenge accepted. The 200 horsepower AC Propulsion TZero with a lithium ion battery pack could do 0-60 mph in 3.6 seconds, and weighed 1,900 lbs. This was not a good looking car, but I bet it was a total riot to drive. Nimble, light, responsive, and with rapid acceleration.
You know what 884 horsepower and a 0-60 mph time of 3.2 seconds tells me? That this Polestar thing is a total lardass. It even looks the part. It’s huge, and it has a length, width, and mass that exceeds that of some midsized SUVs. It looks like one of those XXL fat lady supermodels.
Can’t we skip the misogynist comments? I know that’s hard for guys like you who are frequently confused for Brad Pitt. But maybe we can evolve a little.
Political correctness is not my inclination and never will be. No offense intended, but I was describing the car as I saw it. It isn’t ugly, but it’s definitely obese, bordering on morbidly obese. I like my sports cars light, nimble, and attractive. If I want something heavy, powerful, and aggressive, there’s brodozers for that(not a fan).
I’m all for fat shaming cars when the manufacturers deserve it after deliberately plumping them up. The cars currently available in the U.S. seem to be an apt reflection of its increasingly overweight population.
Torque punch is easily my favorite punch.
I realize this is a wild question to ask, but: with that much power and no gears to shift, how is it only 3.2 to 60?
The batteries must weigh enough to give a practical range, and significant performance hit.
I love the looks of it except for the God awful wheels.
Sure the backseat won’t be able to be used by anyone who isn’t small enough to sit comfortably in a newborn’s car seat but that is true of a lot of sports cars.
The wheels are awesome! At least I think they are. The low, front 3/4 shot looks great.
Really? I thought the wheels were a big plus! 🙂
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I know “fun is better than fast”… and top speeds are pretty much irrelevant 99.9% of the time; and we shouldn’t get too hung up on the numbers game… and a 3.2 sec 0-60 is still insanely fast, but…
Isn’t a 155 top speed/ 3.2 sec sprint to 60 pretty bad for a 884 hp sports car? I mean the C8 is doing sub 3’s, and the Tesla Model S/Plaid is doing sub 2’s. Maybe if it’s tossable through the curves, but who knows with all of that added battery weight (at least it should have a low center of gravity).
If I’m spending (presumably) six figures on an 884 hp sports car, I’d expect better.
The 155 is no doubt governed by the standard European gentleman’s agreement to stop at 250kph.
Agreed the acceleration is sub par, but EVs are going to usher in peak vs sustained HP numbers in a way buyers haven’t had to deal with before. If you have a shop vac, it probably lists a hilarious horsepower number for its motor. And it will truly hit that number, for a fraction of a second in lab testing. Then it’ll crash back down to actually making something less than 2.25, because it’s on a 110 line.
This car will be capable of producing 884HP, in short bursts, before things get too hot, or the battery is just a bit depleted, or whatever. It’s akin to taking your stock car to track day and seeing it overheat constantly, unless you run it at 75%. The manufacturer has pre-selected 75% to protect the components, and that’s why it has acceleration numbers for a 550hp overweight car.
I really believed that the electric revolution would bring back the cheap car. It has everywhere else. Why dont we have MG, Ford Probe, Mitsu Eclipse, Pontiac Solstice, MR2, honda del sol types of cars coming out of our ears? I understand the need for the expensive ones in your business case, but we arent even really seeing concepts of this stuff.
Battery costs. It’s hard enough to do a small EV with decent range, let alone a packaging compromised sportier model. It’ll happen eventually, but not until they’ve nailed the bread and butter stuff.
Aerodynamics and weight reduction is the answer. I built an EV that can do 200 miles range on 1.5 kWh, viewable in my profile. It’s not a sports car or subject to car safety standards, and is really a laughable mockery of a car, but it proves a point regarding efficiency and what is really needed.
A tiny sports car sized like a Lotus 11 and streamlined to a Cd value around the low 0.1X range could easily maintain 70-80 mph highway speeds on only 70-80 Wh/mile, similarly to an Aptera, but with less weight and frontal area and not as eccentric as the Aptera. Guess what that does to the amount of battery mass and cost? You’d only need 120 horsepower to compete regarding acceleration with cars like the Porsche Cayman if you had the mass around 500 kg, but current technology could easily allow 300+ horsepower in such a machine and the ability to make use of it on a regular basis without impacting reliability. You’d have competitive range in normal driving conditions to the standard Tesa 3s and Chevy Volts with only a 15-20 kWh pack.
If I had the money, I’d try to build and sell such things. It is what today’s technology allows and enthusiasts are being robbed by such a thing not being available. We don’t need “sports cars” with heated/air conditioned leather seats, satellite navigation, electronic armrests, and all of this other weight-adding profit-laden crap. Give us simple. Take Colin Chapmen’s advice. Simplify and add lightnesss. THEN apply that advice to wind loading too, so you can careen down the highway at 150 mph on only 80 horsepower.
Sir those projects of yours are amazing
except why not do all that to a Caymen? MPG gains, Performance gains, they all translate to any car, yet the masses either get all those extras tacked on in “Packages” either by choice or in many cases, by necessity to get that specific option they really want. This will not change. if people have to give up something to go EV, they will not want to even more.
People might be willing to give something up if they get something in return. Imagine a poverty-spec car at the bottom of the price range of the market’s offerings, that can accelerate like and top out at speeds comparable to 6-figure cars us mere mortals would never be able to afford? Doable. And there are plenty of people that would jump at the opportunity if it were available. But then how would the industry justify the existence of overpriced halo cars that cost more and are slower? There’s an industry term called “price discrimination”, and the auto industry has mastered it for the better part of a century now. If you want performance, they make you pay out the ass for it, and if you don’t have the money, you’re not deserving of the “exclusivity” of the offerings. And it’s a total garbage philosophy.
Load reduction not only makes inexpensive long-range EVs with small battery packs a possibility, it also offers the possibility for inexpensive supercar performance to be available in a package that has an overall low lifetime operating cost. But if your $25,000 EV can perform in a straight line like an $70,000 Corvette or $700,000 Ferrari and lose them both in the twisties, how does the industry continue to justify the $70,000 price tag for the Corvette or an $700,000 price tag for the Ferrari? Nice interiors? Heated leather seats? Infotainment systems? All the crap that makes the car slower and defeats the purpose of a sports car? GM faced a conundrum with the Pontiac Fiero Turbo more than 30 years ago, as it was going to sell for cheaper than, while being able to out-perform, the more expensive Corvette of the time. Rather then put that out there, likely knowing consumers would buy it instead of the Corvette, GM killed it. It was a fluke that the Fiero Turbo reached that stage of development in the first place.
I agree that aerodynamics and weight reduction are key…..you don’t need a honking battery pack to move something light and you don’t need to mine as many materials either. The Aptera EV is a cool example of this….hopefully it does come to market and isn’t vapourware, but it seems to be legit so far.
I’ve got money down on an Aptera so I am obviously cheering for them. The most interesting thing about Aptera development, besides the design, is the transparency of the process. Plus, they seem to listen to the comments made about some of the proposed design features. I can’t think of another vehicle that was developed so openly.
I was always hoping that VW would make their skateboard architecture available to the masses for them to become creative with it. But then again I am a foolish man for having such unjudicious hopes in the first place.
I’ve given you a lot of shit Adrian, but you’re dead right. Batteries are expensive and battery supply is limited, which pushes manufacturers toward low-volume, high-margin designs. It’ll eventually get better.
People don’t buy small and/or sporty cars that currently exist and haven’t for a while now, what incentive is there for automakers to develop new ones?
Miata? Other ones just didn’t zing.
The Toyobaru twins seem to be doing OK as well. What other small sports cars exist at the moment?
Nissan Z cars, you can get Camaro’s and Moustangs with Turbo fours with killer track suspensions, they are somewhat small. outside of that, few venture into the sports car world anymore.
With the Zs, Camaros, and Mustangs, weight is beginning to approach that of the SUVs and pickup trucks of the 90s and 2000s.
None of the “small and/or sporty” cars are really all that small, or sporty, for starters. Everything is built to fit people that are 300+ lbs. My steel-bodied Triumph GT6 converted to electric lugging around 600 lbs of batteries is nearly 500 lbs lighter than today’s plastic-fantastic gasoline-powered Miata. There’s something wrong with that picture, especially considering how far material sciences have come since that GT6 was built.
The Miata is about the best offering available from a mainstream manufacturer, yet Mazda can’t even come up with the desire to shove the Skyactive 3.0L inline-6 into it and make a coupe version with much lower drag coefficient than the existing offering. The Miata could be a 200 mph capable car that got 50+ EPA HWY MPG for not a lot of added cost if the engineers were allowed the free reign to do it and engineers that had such a function over form vision were hired in the first place. But somehow, that’s not “marketable”.
Thus, the auto industry isn’t getting any of my money on their new car offerings. In fact, given the state of today’s auto industry, I hope it crashes and burns under the crushing red tape it has lobbied into place in effort to keep any budding competition at bay. Then maybe we’ll be able to have cheap fun cars commensurate with the level of technology we have today.
the issue is your Triumph would absolutley result in instant death in most fender benders. and you have to build things to the humans wanting to buy them. 300Lbs is not the problem though I am sure it is exacerbating the issue. The fact that even in poor old england the 60’s stereotypical 5 foot 5 inch 135lb man is definitely not the norm anymore.
While it is true the Triumph is a death trap, if a modern Mitsubishi Mirage of similar mass can be made to pass today’s safety regs, so too can a sports car of similar mass to the Mirage. Plastic and fiberglass are significantly lighter than steel for a similar amount of strength. Nevermind more expensive materials like carbon fiber.
And not everything needs to be built to fit the “people of Walmart” types either.
Most humans don’t have money to buy much of anything. That is also the problem. The reason cheap new cars don’t sell is because they are still priced above the means of most people. Your average new car buyer in the US has an individual income roughly in the 80th percentile, according to a 2015 NADA survey, and that’s for all new cars, including your stripper Nissan Versas and Mitsubishi Mirages. Most Americans don’t even have $500 in savings set aside for an emergency because they live paycheck to paycheck.
It is not coincidental that US automakers and US government are working together to keep increasing safety regulations; it is successfully keeping $4,000-10,000 new cars from China out of the U.S. altogether, cars that might have passed the regulations of 20 years ago, and is also increasing vehicle mass and bloat(and thus profit margin per unit once more features are added in).
The upper 20% are driving the new car market in the U.S., and it shows by the types and prices of new vehicles being bought. Those who are priced out of the new car market have to buy used, and the vehicles retaining the most value are also telling of what the poors actually want in a car. Cars like the Toyota Corolla/Camry, Honda Civic/Accord, small 4-cylinder pickup trucks like the Maverick, are among the best at warding off depreciation, precisely because they are in demand by those to whom factors such as overall operating cost, reliability, fuel efficiency, practicality, ect are the key concerns. Luxury feature-laden gas-guzzling vehicles that are selling well when new, are seeing their values drop off a cliff, for the same reason.
Cheap don’t pay the bills. I expect when EVs get a larger part of the market. And trade ins with damaged bodies get battery packs reused we will see cheaper cars with new bodies and restored batteries. With all the requirements of a car now you can’t build a cheap one.
Cheap is hard to do when the batteries cost so much. the Bolt has been around forever, yet few still buy them, because even though relatively cheap by BEV standards, they are still not cheap. and they usually trade off range (honda cheap looking hot hatch) or build quality to get tot he cheapness they got to. Hell even the Cheap lighting was a one year only thing that only fleet people were allowed to have for a nanosecond. now the 40K lightning is 47K and good luck finding one of those.
This thing is supposed to list at $200k. That’s $15k more than the Taycan Turbo S. Are you kidding?
That’s a 150K to 160K more than I expect to pay for a car ever? Until this last year or so I would have put my upper limits much lower, so who knows.
But it’s electric; shouldn’t it have plus-sign wheels at one end and minus-sign wheels at the other?
“Now look at a picture of the 884 horsepower, all-electric Polestar 6 and try not to care. I dare you.”
Sorry, yet another awkwardly proportioned electric car, trying to get you to overlook how soulless its driving experience is by overcompensating with straight line acceleration. Except this time its a convertible!
Seriously, there are a dozen startups I would have believed this came from.
I thought we left all the C5 Corvette fans behind at Jalopnik – how’d you find this place?
I don’t know how “startup” is an insult when it comes to a car, but here’s a tip – the “soul” in a driving experience isn’t found in the dinosaur juice.
Startup became a problem when Tesla made electric cars into a buzzword and every silicon valley Dick, Harry and Tom started introducing a “new” electric car on the same skateboard platform, Samsung cells, *insert absurd number* horsepower in fastback sedan/SUV styling, a “minimalist” cabin and often “self-driving” somewhere in the price range of a well-optioned Mercedes Benz to drum up investor interest and have his 15 minutes of tycoon status before declaring bankruptcy.
EV startups are usually a con, but they’ve forced Polestar, a subsidiary of an established company that is aware of the consequences of overpromising and underengineering, to play the same game because you can’t market a reasonable electric car when there’s 50 insane ones “about to be released”. They need this monstrosity if they want to sell their sensible electric sport saloons by association.
Nah. There’s a lot of car enthusiasts who are struggling with the whole EV proposition. And we don’t own C5s (at least I don’t) 🙂
“There are a lot of electric carmakers. There are a lot of electric crossovers. If Sino-Swedish carmaker Polestar is one of those brands you just casually forget about it’s kinda hard to blame you.”
That arial view photo makes it look like it actually has a back seat, but only for people without legs.
It’s going to be the next viral TikTok challenge: trying to sit cross-legged (the only way you’ll fit) in the “backseat” of a Polestar 6 and calmly meditate with your eyes closed while the driver goes full-send through a twisty mountain road.
Hopefully the production version has real back seats…or at least embraces its style and becomes a roomy coupe.
A few inches stretch to the wheelbase would help the proportions as well as add leg roon
I’m hoping it has no back seat. Ideally with a storage shelf like a CRX. No actual person fits in a 2+2. Don’t bother with seatbelts or upholstery.
After owning a couple of sports cars where the front seats go all the way back to touch the back seats, I’m convinced that the ‘back seats’ are put there to bring the insurance premiums down, not to hold passengers.
This is what I a going to post. The 2+2 was to say “See it is a 4 seater!” When really they are crap holders.
I’m hoping it has no back seat. Ideally with a storage shelf like a CRX. No actual person fits in a 2+2. Don’t bother with seatbelts or upholstery.
That’s got to be wrong. No insurance adjuster is going to look at a 911 with a back seat and say it’s the same as a Kia Carnival. I drive a car with a back seat that only fits Capt. Dan. It’s silly and should have been a storage shelf or more trunk space.
Not all. My M4 convertible can fit two adults in the backseat (albeit, short, small females) but adults nonetheless. They’re more often used for two dogs though and that’s all we need it for.
Well it’s big enough to fit 4 people. Maybe it will.
I’m hoping it has no back seat. Ideally with a storage shelf like a CRX. No actual person fits in a 2+2. Don’t bother with seatbelts or upholstery.