I drove the Polestar 5 – the electric super-GT ready to take on the Porsche Taycan

Six years ago, at the start of 2020, Polestar – then a new car company, spun off from Volvo with much to prove – wowed us all with the Precept.

A concept car outlining what the company hoped to deliver in its formative years, the Precept was a stunning piece of vehicle design. An electric grand tourer with a sharp but muscular body, and an interior reminiscent of a business class cabin. It looked magnificent.

Now, a fair few years later than expected, the Precept has become reality in the form of the Polestar 5.

Bookending the first era of Polestar as a standalone car company – which began with the hybrid 1, then shifted to full-electric for the 2, 3 and 4 – the 5 is a stunning vehicle, inside and out. It also uses a bespoke bonded aluminium chassis that shares nothing with the rest of the Polestar family, or even anything with other members of the Geely automotive group, which includes Volvo and Lotus.

But what is it actually like? T3 headed to Northumberland to find out.

The 5 is a bold signal of intent from Polestar. An electric grand tourer that starts at £89,500 and tops out at over £115,000 when all boxes are ticked, it squares up neatly against rivals like the Porsche Taycan, Audi e-tron GT, Lotus Emeya – and, yes, the new Jaguar Type 01.

My first encounter with the Polestar 5 couldn’t have been more incongruous. It’s the sort of grey, misty day that this part of Northern England is particularly good at. The air is damp with drizzle, cobblestones glisten beneath tourists’ feet and the medieval Alnwick Castle broods in the background in a way that would please the Brontë sisters. A bright white Polestar 5 sits among this like an alien spaceship in search of a charging station.

It might be the most striking car on sale today. And I’m not saying that because I don’t want to be rude. I mean it’s striking in the best way possible. Sharp, clean and modern, it manages to portray enormous presence without making the all-too-common mistake of confusing assertiveness with aggression. It’s wide, low, long and powerful, but isn’t a car whose driver probably likes to flash us all out of the fast lane.

Inside, the killer design continues with a 4+1 seating arrangement that provides seatbelts for five, but in reality there are supposed to be two occupants in the back instead of the usual three. A centre armrest lowers over the middle seat, properly separating the outer two and giving passengers stowage and a touch panel for controlling their seat heating, cooling and massage. These seats can also be reclined electronically and there’s masses of knee and headroom.

It’s properly luxurious back there – a sensation aided by the 5’s massive glass roof that’s over two metres long and fills the cabin with light, even on a miserable Northern day.

There’s no rear windscreen, as in the Polestar 4, so instead the driver has a camera and digital display, which I think works very well but some glasses wearers don’t always get along with. The rest of the driving environment is similar to other members of the Polestar family, its dashboard dominated by a huge, portrait-oriented touchscreen, a letterbox-shaped driver display behind the wheel, and…not much else.

It isn’t quite as spartan as a Tesla – smart implementation of a range of interesting, often recycled materials help prevent that – but it’s a touch too clinical. Polestar’s touchscreen works well, and its user interface combined with Google’s Android Automotive is among today’s best infotainment systems.

But in a six-figure car I’d prefer to see some money spent on tactile switchgear. I’m not asking for Ferrari Luce levels of Leica-like tactility, but some nicely damped dials for cabin temperature and fan speed would have been welcome, or a bank of cold-to-the-touch toggle switches could have been fun. The 5 is expected to be the final car of Polestar’s first era, so hopefully the next generation will see a shift away from today’s touchscreen dominance.

The 21-speaker, 1,610-watt Bowers & Wilkins sound system is fabulous – both in the way it looks and sounds – but bizarrely lacks the Dolby Atmos and Spatial Audio compatibility that makes the Polestar 3’s B&W stereo such a treat, which is a shame.

Happily, driving the Polestar 5 makes up for this shortfall. Not because it sounds good – Polestar has rightly opted for silence instead of pretend engine histrionics – but because it’s an absolute joy to drive. Our 170-mile test route took in some seriously challenging roads across the very north of England, and the 5 never put a foot wrong.

Much of this is thanks to the clever bonded aluminium chassis, which is extremely stiff. That inherent stiffness meant everything attached to it – the suspension, the steering, etc. – could be tuned to do exactly what Polestar’s engineers wanted, instead of wasting bandwidth masking the downfalls of wobbly foundations.

Despite being a touch over five metres long, two metres wide and weighing 2,500 kg, the Polestar 5 hides its bulk remarkably well. I drove the standard car, known as the Dual Motor, which lacks the clever MagneRide semi-active suspension of the pricier Performance model, but still uses its passive dampers with hydraulic rebound stops to excellent effect. It’s flat, stable and composed through the corners, while remaining comfortable too and not being spoiled by the overly firm ride some other Polestars exhibit.

The Dual Motor is down on power too – not that you’d especially notice during normal driving. It still serves up 748 horsepower and 812 Nm of torque, sprints to 62 mph in 3.9 seconds and has a top speed of 155 mph. Its massive 112 kWh battery uses an 800-volt architecture, charges at up to 350 kW and can fill from 10 to 80% in as little as 22 minutes.

The Polestar 5 Performance (which starts at £104,900) produces 884 hp and 1,015 Nm – proper supercar figures – and hits 62 mph in 3.2 seconds. The top speed is the same, and so too is its battery size and charging performance.

Range is up to a claimed 416 miles for the Dual Motor and 351 miles in the Performance, but these figures depend on how the car is driven.

Given the challenging test route – and how the car had likely been driven in a spirited manner by journalists since the day it was born – I saw an estimate of just 260 miles from 97%. But the average consumption for my drive was 3.16 miles per kWh, which equates to a theoretical range of about 354 real-world miles, or 62 short of what Polestar claims using the WLTP test cycle.

Back to the actual driving, and the Polestar 5 strikes a nice balance between fun and civility. There’s no artificial noise, no fake gears and not even a set of paddles for adjusting regenerative braking, so in that sense you feel a little detached from the massive performance.

But the steering is nice, the brakes are strong, the rate of acceleration is massive and, despite its scale, the 5 handles with an athleticism that matches the exterior. I haven’t driven the Performance model, so will reserve judgement on whether the extra power (and, more importantly, the clever suspension) make enough difference to be worth the extra £15,400.

Should you buy the Polestar 5?

Six years is a long time in today’s electric car world. Had the Polestar 5 arrived soon after the Precept, it would have landed like that sucker punch to the establishment Elon Musk once said the Tesla Roadster would make.

Instead, we’re now well into the second generation of Porsche Taycan, the Lotus Emeya has failed to escape niche territory, and the sales success of the Jaguar Type 01 is, for now, anyone’s guess.

That makes life harder for the Polestar – indeed, for any six-figure, electric grand tourer – but it doesn’t make the car any less impressive. Crucially, it still looks remarkably close to the Precept, and as a result is one of the most beautiful cars on sale today. I could almost suggest you buy it on looks alone; it really is that jaw-droppingly handsome in person. And the bespoke chassis gives it the driving dynamics to back up those looks, too.

There are some frustrations. The lack of a rear windscreen still won’t be for everyone, and the emphasis on a big touchscreen over tactile switchgear is an opportunity missed at this price point.

And while a relatively niche market segment, the Polestar 5 finds itself up against some exceptionally capable competition from brands with greater mass-market appeal. But after a day on some of the UK’s best roads, I came away with a smile on my face. The Polestar 5 looks sensational, inside and out, drives beautifully, and charges quickly. It might have arrived a little late, but it’s a fine flagship for the Polestar family.