Polestar 1: $156K Plug-In Hybrid Rated at 52 Miles of Electric Range

Polestar 1: $156K Plug-In Hybrid Rated at 52 Miles of Electric Range

Published: July 7, 2020 | By: American Luxury Staff

Polestar, the Volvo/Geely subsidiary which specializes in electric performance luxury cars, might have raised an eyebrow recently when its figurehead model, the Polestar 1, got an official rating from the EPA. The rating of 52 electric-only miles comes in significantly under the company’s estimate of 90, which was detailed in a press release in 2017.

The car’s development has been a long road for the company, and the rating, while not particularly good news, is probably not cause for alarm at Polestar’s headquarters. The Porsche Taycan 4S was pegged at 203 miles by the EPA; testing done later by Autoblog put the number at over 300 miles, and the European WLTP rating of the same model variant checks in at 288.

The Polestar 1 is equipped with a dual-battery setup that provides 34 kWh of energy. That’s a lot of juice. Even given the demands of the Polestar 1’s over 600 horsepower ICE/electric motor drivetrain, the rating number is, to put it diplomatically, low. Suffice it to say that there’s a solid chance the Polestar 1’s real-world full charge range will exceed the EPA estimate by a substantial amount.

Although there were rumors initially that the Polestar 1 would be subscription only, it appears that Geely/Volvo has set a base sticker price for the uptown model: $156K. Each of the 500 produced annually is hand-made; 1,500 examples will be produced in all.

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