CEO Thomas Ingenlath teases hotter Polestar 2 prototype on Instagram
The electric sedan has lowered suspension, body color fender flares and bigger wheels. And it looks hot.
Well what could this be?
Polestar originally started out as a racing team before being acquired by Volvo and morphing into the Swedish brand's in-house performance arm. The racing team has since been renamed Cyan Racing, while Polestar was spun off into its own full-fledged brand, which is focused on premium EVs and tuning existing Volvo models. The brand's first production car, the Polestar 1, was a high-end hybrid coupe, while the second car, the Polestar 2, is an electric sedan that competes with the Tesla Model 3 . Despite the Polestar brand's beginnings -- and the Polestar 2 being one of the most fun-to-drive EVs on sale -- it isn't exactly focused on putting out true performance cars . But based on a couple photos shared on Instagram by CEO Thomas Ingenlath, that might be changing.
In the first image, which was posted in early March, we can see a lineup of four Polestar 2s, with the prototype in question the most prominently visible. Immediately the most notable difference compared to a standard Polestar 2 is the stance. This prototype is riding on the awesome 21-inch four-spoke wheels from the Polestar 1 coupe, an option not available on the 2 -- the largest factory wheels you can currently get are 20s -- and the car has also been lowered by over an inch.
While the car's bodywork isn't any different, this Polestar 2 has the fender flares and lower body trim painted white to match the body color, another option unavailable on the regular car. Along with the lowered stance, this gives the Polestar 2 an even sportier look, especially in white, and the car also has a black roof and black mirror caps instead of the standard body color.
The second post that went up yesterday is a close-up (sadly, of low quality) look at the prototype's wheel. The brake discs seem larger than the Brembo units that the performance pack–equipped Polestar 2s get, and the gold-painted calipers look like they might be bigger than the regular ones, too. I think they could be the awesome Akebono units from the Polestar 1, an assumption backed up by Ingenlath's hashtagging "Akebono" in the first post (though he hashtagged "Brembo" in the second one).
The caption of the first post reads "Experiment" and contains hashtags for Akebono, Ohlins, and the words "prototype" and "tuning." More intriguingly, the caption for the second post says "PS2BST 1(7)." Now, I've got absolutely no idea what that means. PS2 obviously stands for Polestar 2, but what could BST be? An acronym for something? The name of a new performance trim? And I'm not even gonna bother guessing what 1(7) means. I commented on the post to ask, so fingers crossed Ingenlath replies to me.
I did reach out to a US Polestar spokesperson to see if they had any insight into this prototype. "The design department is regularly playing with these types of ideas and stances," the spokesperson said, "especially since Thomas is a huge product and design advocate." But there are currently no short-term plans for production of whatever this hotter Polestar 2 is.
Still, the existence of this car at least shows that Polestar is considering a hotter version of the Polestar 2, and that's exciting. With over 400 horsepower and a sub-4.5-second 0-to-60 time, the current model is already damn quick and fun to drive, so a high-po version with a boost in power and sharper handling would be welcome. Plus, it would look damn good.
