Grand Touring Across Spain In The Polestar 5 Was Like Driving A Spaceship Into The Future
Right, you’re here because you want to know about the car. Every one of the routes that Polestar picked for each leg had incredible driving roads and scenery, but the team kept saying how we were on one of the best legs because both days of driving were mainly on “the silent route,” spectacular roads snaking through the countryside and carving around mountains called silent because they’re essentially never used, not even by tourists people who live in the tiny, ancient towns peppered throughout the area. The roads don’t really go anywhere of note, or they’re too narrow and twisty to be chosen by tourists. And the route really did feel silent — we only came upon a handful of other drivers in total, with the roads otherwise basically just for us. This was also the longest of the legs, covering 375 miles in total.
Within minutes of leaving our hotel in Sitges the road became so narrow that even when I positioned the Polestar’s right wheels over the line on the right shoulder, where there were immediate guardrails or ditches, the car’s left tires were fully over the center line. The 5 is a large car, but not especially so — at 200.3 inches long it’s about an inch longer than a current Porsche Panamera, and just over an inch wider with the mirrors folded. Even a Miata would struggle to stay between the lines on this road, so I was already taking it pretty slow and cautious, and the road was twisty enough that I wouldn’t want to go that fast on it regardless of the width. Then, about fifteen minutes into our drive, the route’s silence was broken by a McLaren W1 test car coming towards us around a tight bend. Talk about a “holy s**t” moment. That would be the only other car we came across for an hour.
Luckily the road soon widened up enough to have actual space to drive a car, and I could start having some real fun. For the first day, Cameron and I were in a Performance, the upper of the 5’s two trim levels. Its dual motors pump out a total of 884 horsepower and 749 pound-feet of torque, with 603 hp and 487 lb-ft of that being from the in-house-designed rear motor. Polestar says it’ll hit 60 mph in 3.1 seconds, but I think that’s conservative by at least a few tenths. Flooring it results in a truly invigorating gut-punch of instant acceleration, but the power delivery and throttle mapping is nice and linear, so it’s easy to drive the car calmly or zip past a truck without going full hyperspeed.
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Blissfully, Polestar keeps drive modes and adjustability to a minimum. You can toggle between standard or Performance modes for the powertrain, with the later unlocking more power and increasing the responsiveness; in both cars on both days, we kept it them in the Performance mode basically the whole time, as it doesn’t make the car too twitchy or annoying for slower, regular driving.
Polestar could have made a big sedan that looked kind of like the 5 and would probably drive fine if it used one of the Geely brands’ existing scalable architectures, but in order to pull off the design and dynamics, it made the pretty wild decision to design an advanced bonded aluminum platform from scratch. Called Polestar Performance Architecture, it’s as rigid as a carbon-tubbed two-seat supercar, and lighter and stronger than a typical EV platform. The 5’s wheelbase is a massive 120.2 inches, a 4-inch stretch compared to a Panamera, and Polestar says the 5 weighs 5,512 pounds, almost 500 pounds more than a Taycan GTS. But there aren’t any active anti-roll bars, air springs, torque vectoring systems or rear-wheel steering to help hide the 5’s weight and size — it’s just well set up from jump thanks to the PPA architecture, and it felt a lot more agile than I expected going into the drive.
The double-wishbone, front brakes and steering rack are all positioned ahead of the front axle, which not only improved the feedback and handling but also let the designers dramatically lower the hood and set it at an angle that would make a Lamborghini jealous. On both trims you can choose between three different modes for the steering: Light, Standard and Firm. I found Light to be too light for my tastes, with Firm being my favorite, though it will definitely be too heavy for some. While not as sharp as a Taycan, the 5’s steering is noticeably more communicative and precise than other Polestars, and the car was a real joy to drive.
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Going for the Performance model gets you coil springs with semi-active MagneRide dampers that read the road up to 1,000 times per second, and three settings for the stiffness (Standard, Nimble and Firm). As we transitioned onto some faster roads with greater elevation changes, the 5 stayed remarkably flat and neutral, even when whipping around uphill hairpins. Though it’s clear that the car is heavy, it’s far from unwieldy, and the weight balance is a perfect 50:50. Still, I didn’t get a great idea of the 5’s ride quality because the pavement was essentially perfect on our entire route. It’s unclear whether that’s because the road is constantly being maintained, or because it’s the silent route and no one drives on it, so the surface hasn’t needed to be maintained. When we did encounter some rougher areas or drove on cobblestone streets through empty towns, the Performance’s ride was always quite smooth.
21-inch wheels are standard on the Performance, but these cars were equipped with the optional 22s, wrapped in Michelin Pilot Sport S5 tires with a Polestar-specific compound, sized 255/35 in front and 295/30 in the rear. (The Dual Motor car gets 20-inch aero wheels that are still staggered-width but a size narrower, with all the 21s being the same width as the 22s.) It never felt like I was lacking for grip; if anything I could’ve pushed the car even harder. The 22s look extremely good, too.
Fitted as standard to both versions of the 5 are Brembo front brakes with four-piston calipers and 15.7-inch two-piece ventilated discs, but it is worth going for the Performance because then you get Swedish Gold calipers that look awesome. The brake pedal felt progressive and firm, but I only had to give it a few light taps even on the fastest sections and sharpest turns. There are three settings for the regenerative braking, with the strongest giving true one-pedal driving that’s one of the best-tuned examples I’ve used. Driving through a town or really hustling in the mountains, the regen was basically telepathic in its behavior.
