At the show, we had a brief chat with Thomas Ingenlath, Polestar’s CEO. Ingenlath isn’t your standard corporate type — he’s largely credited as the designer who took Volvo from dowdy to slick. With Polestar he’s pushing boundaries as well, so the newest drop, the Polestar 4, is a tech tour-de-force, especially as the brand pushes toward better autonomy. Ingenlath explained that LiDAR (lasers that enable 3-D mapping) is the key to advanced hands-free driving, and made it clear that Polestar wants to stake this out as a distinguishing characteristic of its cars.
As for the Polestar 4, the $54,900 long-range (300-mile range) single-motor hatchback arrives at the end of 2024, and it’s fairly critical to the success of the company. Along with the Polestar 3, which is more of an SUV, both cars are much larger inside than the diminutive Polestar 2, a VW Golf-sized hatchback that’s more apt for European drivers than American ones.
Beyond safety tech, Polestar has been a quiet pioneer in seamless software integration, running their cars on Google’s Android Automotive OS as well as Google built-in. Part of that experience is never turning the car “on” or off. Just walk up and the car unlocks and you can drive away. Exit, and it turns itself off and re-locks, no keys or button pushing required.
