Not Quite a Track Day ...

And yet, the best test drive ever

“It’s not a real track day,” I told myself as we dodged the raindrops and hopped into the Polestar 3s that were lined up outside The Lodge at Sonoma, the bougie wine-country resort where we were staying for this one-day, Polestar-sponsored “track experience.”

Taking off from the Lodge in a steady rain

Polestar—in case you haven’t been obsessively tracking the electric vehicle (EV) market for the last 10 years, in case you don’t have a detailed spreadsheet listing all the EVs you’re considering for your next car purchase, with ratings from car mags, your wife, and your son all factored into the rankings—is the former performance division of Volvo¹. They’re the folks responsible for those cool cyan blue V60s you might have seen, and for the “Polestar tune” you can apply to regular old Volvos. I installed a Polestar tune on our V90 Cross Country and it never ceases to tickle me when I see the faces of the Audi or BMW drivers I beat off the line.

Polestar wowed the auto world in 2019 with its limited-production Polestar 1, then settled into producing the all-electric Polestar 2 fastback in 2020. Freed from Volvo (and now largely controlled by the Chinese giant Geely Holdings), Sweden-based Polestar revealed the Polestar 3 in 2022 and started bringing the SUV to the American market just this year (2024). The 3 is poised to make or break the brand in the American market, though they’re not waiting for the verdict: Polestars 4 and 5 are already in the works.

To woo fans and prospective drivers to their new car, Polestar organized a track day— sorry, no, a “track experience”—to show off what the Polestar 3 can do. I signed up the moment I learned of it, eager to see what an EV could do on the track. I love track days, finding it very hard to resist the chance to flog someone else’s car within an inch of its life ALL DAY LONG. But to flog an EV … I knew it would be different; I just didn’t know how.

Rain

My expectations were dampened by rain, lots of it. The day before Sara and I flew down to San Francisco, a massive storm blew into the Bay Area, leading to a rare tornado touching down in the area. Monday dawned with more rain and little prospect of it letting up.

Probably a good thing, then, that we weren’t hopping into rear-drive sports cars—as I’d done at track days hosted by BMW and Porsche. Polestar’s Swedish-designed, all-wheel-drive SUVs were fully capable of handling anything that the weather threw at us, I consoled myself.

We got our first taste of the cars on a leisurely thirty-minute drive from the lodge to the track, swapping drivers mid-way through the trip. I was immediately impressed by a few things about the car—the tasteful interior, minimalist but not austere, all swathed in shades of grey; the responsive software, all black and orange, so easy to figure out; the stereo!—but let’s be honest: it was the seats that really won me, not least because Sara has established that comfy seats are non-negotiable. The Polestar’s seats are truly first class, swathed in supple leather, heated and cooled, with multiple massage options and the ability to adjust EVERYTHING you’d want to adjust. I’ll talk about handling soon enough, and the power was there too—like it is in every EV on our list. You push the gas pedal and it feels like a giant wave rises up behind you and pushes you inexorably forward. If you haven’t driven an EV yet, you really need to give it a shot. The power (ok, the torque) is irresistible.

But all the rain had me wondering how the cars would handle the wet. We soon found out. We kicked off our track experience just like you kick off most track days, by piling into the cars and driving out into the massive Sonoma Raceway parking lot, which had been marked off with orange cones for two different exercises: a slalom course, where you weave between cones at increasing speeds, and a braking exercise, where you drive straight at a set of cones until you hit a braking point, then slam the brakes and steer around the cones, trying not to hit them. Both drills are intended to get you familiar with how the car behaves under adverse conditions. Throughout the day, we alternated between the Polestar 3 and several different variants on the Polestar 2, including the souped-up BST version.

Any concerns I had about whether we’d get to flog these EVs like I’d flogged sports cars in the past quickly dissipated. The affable Swedish test driver Thed Björk (who had recently finished the TCR World Tour as runner-up) implored us to mash the brakes like we meant it. Mash them we did, and found that these 6,000-pound behemoths danced around the cones very nimbly, thank you very much. Chris Nunn, the other lead driver, urged us to push ever faster through the slalom.

Thed Björk

Chris Nunn

By the time we finished the morning, I think all of us were building real confidence in how hard we could push these cars. But what would it be like to get them on a real racetrack?

Before we could find that out, we had the unique pleasure of sitting down for a virtual conversation with Polestar’s Senior Chassis Development Engineer Joakim Rydholm, who called in en-route to some testing in Iceland. Rydholm explained how the torque vectoring in the 3 helped the car stay so composed when turning and other such technical stuff, but it wasn’t his technical acumen that impressed me so much as his enthusiasm for the cars Polestar is making. You got the impression that he was having the time of his life.

Out on the Track

I was tickled as hell to be at Sonoma Raceway, a track I’d never driven on before, truly one of the classic American road courses. As we went out on our tentative first lap, I plotted how I would spend the afternoon unlocking this track: figuring out where to place my tires as I climbed the series of curves up the towering hill that takes you from Turn 1 through 3; calibrating how much speed I could carry as I unwound the carousel of Turn 6; and then testing the various lines through the ess-curves. Every track is a set of problems to be solved, and I was eager to solve them.

Sonoma Raceway on a sunny day

And then we picked it up, the lead driver quickening the pace, the other drivers testing whether they could keep up. Hell yes! I was chomping at the bit for more.

But no! After just one “hot” lap, Chris came on the radio: “Okay, now let’s do a cool-down lap and get ready to exit to the pits.”

“Cool-down lap?,” I groused to my co-driver, John. “Why the hell are we on a cool-down lap? We’ve barely warmed up?”

I wanted more, dammit: I wanted to keep pushing the car round and round the circuit, kissing the curbing, pushing myself to go faster and faster with each passing lap. I wasn’t worried about the rain. I knew how to drive in the rain and it wouldn’t diminish my fun.

But turning in after just three laps? Now THAT could diminish my fun.

Luckily I’m a grown man, not a petulant child, and I had a word with myself. This was an EV track day, it was always going to be different. It had to be different. It’s just that up until now, it hadn’t been. I just needed to think about why.

Entering Turn 4

Rounding Turn 11

Managing Electric Cars on the Track

From the moment I had signed up, I wondered how Polestar was going to manage battery life during a day at the track. Would they find time to recharge the batteries while we ate lunch? Would they swap in a second set of cars? Something had to give ... but what?

I’d seen EVs on the track before, at Laguna Seca and again at Pacific Raceways. They were fast on the straightways, not quite as fast on the corners, but when it came to using power, they were greedy pigs. After 15 or 20 minutes of hard driving they were slinking off in search of the nearest fast charger. At best, your typical EV could only manage half the driving time of a gas-powered car.

When they sent us out for just three laps at a time, the Polestar team was managing battery performance. By preventing us from going too fast for too long, they kept us from overheating and draining the batteries. In this way, we were able to enjoy multiple 3-lap sessions, all afternoon long.

And the cars did great. I never sensed any falloff in performance through the full afternoon of lapping, though to tell the truth, we simply hadn’t been allowed to push the cars as hard or for as long as I really wanted. In the end, they got a full track day out of a single charge and I got about 85% of what I had hoped for—and maybe 120% of what I deserved.

I’m such a speed junkie that I really wished I’d been able to push the cars harder on the track. But once I learned more about the battery management constraints, I understood. Honestly, if they’d told us right at the start that the staging of events was to manage battery, I might have whined a little bit less. Maybe.

I had to remind myself, this was a “track experience,” not a balls-out track day. Asking an EV to perform just like an ICE car is really missing the point.

I had to give Polestar this: they’d staged the best test drive I’ve had since the BMW track day that convinced me to buy the M2. And it wasn’t just a test drive of the cars but also of the experience of being in the Polestar ecosystem, surrounded by Polestar owners, employees, and drivers. This day wasn’t about convincing us that the Polestars were legitimate track performers, after all. It was about showing us that the Polestar 3 was a highly capable and comfortable luxury SUV that acquitted itself surprisingly well under hard driving. To that end, mission accomplished. I was persuaded.

The question remains: was I ready to buy one?

What About the Romance?

In my ideal world, I’d make a car buying decision based solely on rational considerations: the way it drives, the way the software functions, the way the seats feel, how efficient it is. (And sure, what it costs!)

But if I’m honest, my relationship with cars isn’t just pragmatic or rational. It’s also romantic, emotional. I identify with the cars I drive, and when I choose well, my cars provide me with deep emotional satisfaction and also say something about who I am.² The aesthetics of any car look backward and forward across time. There have been cars that have satisfied me very deeply—my 1981 VW Rabbit, our 2017 Volvo V90 Cross Country—and cars that have come so very close—my 2015 Subaru WRX and my 2020 BMW M2 Competition—and yet were somehow incomplete. Every successive car I own clarifies further my ideals, and not just my ideals but those of my wife, who shares the car with me. Does it sound like I’m romantically entangled with cars? Well yeah, I guess I am.

Car makers know this about car buyers, and they want car buyers to fall in love with them. All their marketing, all those glossy ads, that slick branding: it’s a bid for love, for acceptance. Sometimes it goes terribly, disastrously wrong: see the recent re-branding video from Jaguar. It had next to nothing to say about the cars, but everything to say about who they imagined as their consumer. In my book, they got it terribly, disastrously wrong. Once, I could see myself in a Jaguar ... but not now.

In its public presentation and at this event, Polestar is courting me, seeking my love. A lot of it is working. Their heritage as the performance division of Volvo—the ultimate yoking of performance and functionality—really speaks to me (it helps that I’ve owned three Volvos over the years). I really dig Polestar’s minimalist design; the emphasis on innovation, engineering, and technology; the effort to make a comfortable luxury car that also performs well.

Beyond just the cars, there is the visual identity: the logo, the font (Unica 77, in case you wondered), the design language that appears on all their gear, from water bottles to jackets to duffel bags. When I picture myself in a new car, I can easily place myself in the milieu of the Polestar aesthetic.

And yet I’m wary, cynical. When they lean in so hard on sustainability and recyclable materials, when they introduce a car in a cube on a rocky island, it can feel like they’re trying too hard. Branding and marketing efforts can feel so manipulative. So when I arrived at my hotel to find Polestar branded cookies, a lovely orange water bottle, and a lavish coffee-table book about the brand, I was simultaneously impressed that they’d gone all out ... and wary of the marketing-team press. It’s tricky to love a brand that is trying so hard to be loved.

The branding continued throughout the experience: the hotel was gussied up with Polestar signage, and they styled the hospitality suite at Sonoma Raceway so well that it felt like Polestar’s home base. Everywhere you looked, the brand language was consistent and tasteful. And that continued right to the very end. When we left the closing dinner and returned to our room, there was a surprise parting gift: a beautiful, waterproof duffel bag, done up in Polestar’s beautiful design language.

The hospitality center, done up Polestar style

Even the helmets bear the brand

Pretty sweet swag huh?

If it had just been the swag and the utter consistency of the branding, I might have resisted. But it was the people that really did it....

From Kassie, who greeted us at the airport; to Cambria and Laura, who managed the show; to the lead drivers, Chris and Thed, who guided us around the track and laughed with us over dinner; to Joakim, who nerded out on the technology—their entire team was utterly committed to making this a great experience. They were warm, helpful, and genuinely enthusiastic about their cars.

If people this decent, this authentic, wanted to be associated with the brand, well maybe my cynicism was misplaced. Maybe this really was a car I could love.

Will the Polestar 3 be my next car? It’s too early to tell, since I’m not likely to buy until summer 2026 and I’m prolonging the evaluation process to the point of utter absurdity. It’s not lost on me that getting this absorbed in planning a future car purchase is a bit … oh, you supply the adjective. All I can tell you is I love cars.

Note: The majority of the pictures were provided to all attendees by Polestar.

1. It’s a little more complicated than that, but this isn’t a history of Polestar. You can find that here.

2. When I choose poorly—as I’ve done from time to time—it’s a total disaster! See the 2004 Hyundai Elantra I mentioned in this piece.