2021 Volvo Polestar 2: Regular Car Reviews

Is this all? There is just electric cars all the way down who could possibly care at this point. The infrastructure isnt there, its not gon na, be there and range dude forget about range. Decent range is a figment of California imagination. Oh you want to solve climate change bro. Let me tell you something about climate change. Look me. I dont. I dont care about climate change at all, but if I did, I would make a couple of good points about lithium Mining and itll really make you raise a few eyebrows. Is it worse than fossil fuels? Yeah? Probably what? If everyone got EVS, you think the grid can handle an electrified bukaki. If everyone has EVS, no one has money in their bank, account the economy, tanks, and unless you enjoy paying 1100 a month for your electricity, then I dont see why you would want everyone to have an EV. My patience right now is thinner than the slices at a fifth grade pizza party and Ill. Tell you something else. The hippies who drive these things they are gon na have kids who grow up to be the kind of parent who decides its their job to discipline. Everybody elses kid: if my teenager look, if my teenager wants to drop a Thrice on the Foosball table in the community center, then Ill be the one who tells them no more whippets, but as far as Im concerned, youre not going to be the way.

Okay, I cant do this bit anymore. This episode of RCR is brought to you by raycon earbuds, with optimized gel tips for the perfect in ear fit. These earbuds are so comfortable and they will not budge. They will not fall out of your ear. Even if you get super sweaty, they charge in this little egg and you get eight hours of play time and a 32 hour battery life. They have three customized sound profiles, noise, isolation and awareness mode and the best thing is they fit inside. Your motorcycle helmet put the helmet on your head. Mushroom style, get the wrong way. This is the right one. Theyre right and left now carefully pulled it out there. They go therein. Yep theyre in wheres, my phone, oh, need my glasses half the time Im riding my motorcycle with earplugs in anyway to just attenuate the world. So why not just do this Yep, theyre playing so click on the link in the description or go to byraycon.com RCR? To get 15 off site wide with code holiday, there will also be new pop up deals every day during raycons countdown to Christmas and Ill try to keep the description box updated with the latest offers, but just so you know you can always go to buy recon.com. Rcr to get the best deals available on raycon. Does anyone actually hate electric cars like as a concept the fact of their existence? Does anyone truly hate these cars in which they would go away? Are there people whom electric vehicles simply will never reach, or is it that these theoretical opponents of electric vehicles simply havent found the right one? Yet because, if thats true, then I would think there are few EVS.

That would be as agreeable an entry point. As the pole, star too, even while acknowledge that among electric vehicles yeah its not really the best one out there but heres the thing. The pole, star 2 is a lot like the Charles Bukowski saying about how an intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. Whereas an artist will say a hard thing in a simple way, this is an electric car that says a nominally difficult thing in a very simplistic fashion, because its attempting to make electric vehicles as accessible as possible without sacrificing science fiction Notions of luxury, because you see Its a Volvo really and it kind of looks like a modern Volvo, too. Our volunteer Jim, even told us most people. He encounters think its a Volvo because of the Thors, hammer headlights but thats, not necessarily a bad thing, because the lack of any extraneous badging will keep anyone from actually realizing what this is in the first place. I came across one of these as I was driving along Route 100. One night and didnt know what the hell I was looking at and almost didnt care enough to find out until I saw this this little badge right here, its one of the few indications youre driving a pole star other than this little sticker right here, oh – and I guess the little emblem on the steering wheel. You know there are some indications that youre driving a pole star, but in the grand scheme of things I could truly say I had no clue what I was seeing, because I couldnt remember the last automaker Id come across.

Who aimed to be this mysterious about their brand, which is odd, because pollstar actually has a pretty cool story. It essentially began as a team of Engineers tuning Volvos to race in the Swedish Touring Car Championship in 1996, eventually working hand in hand with Volvo and becoming a licensed partner under the name pole, Star Performance before being bought by Volvo outright in 2015, making them more Or less a luxury Performance Wing of the Swedish automaker. This is sort of like Richard Hammond, being a loyal fan of the original Top Gear back in the 70s and then getting to audition for the 2002 relaunch with Jeremy Clarkson. Never thinking hed actually get the gig, but then he did and now you could argue hes as synonymous with the glory years of that show. As the era he used to watch and in the same way, pole star is in a unique position to be the reason. People talk about Volvo in the 2020s, because what we have here is a car that more or less was designed to be a Volvo. It started out as the Volvo Concept 40.2 in conjunction with the Volvo Concept 40.1, which would eventually become the Volvo xc40. But the concept 40.2 took a different approach, as the company was moving away from the plug in hybrid foundation of the pole, star one and finally getting in on the EV craze full scale: emphasis on full scale. Since the limited run of the pole, star 1 meant that the pole, star 2, would be the first mass produced pole star vehicle in existence.

This all wheel, drive pole star, offers a dual cool motor that gets you around 408 horsepower and 487 pound feet of torque and a top speed of 127 miles per hour. Okay, fun time, okay, so its kind of like Kias in that uh Ill bet, sport mode. That mean thats some good amount of good amount of shunt, so Im going to beat pants off in my Kia from what I have read. Sport mode does nothing except during traction control. It doesnt change the suspension, it doesnt change, with the run on that really thats. Thats, what Ive read all sports all sport mode does on my key is change is to change throttle position it just it just accelerates faster on the thing or thats a lie. Eco mode will rubber band your acceleration, so you can romp on it from a dead. Stop: okay, hey buddy range is supposedly around 230 miles on a single charge and the dash says 250 miles when fully charged right now, youre, seeing it at around 70 percent, but Jim feels he can get above 275 when fully Juiced. Oh another thing that I would find insanely useful is the curry hook right here in the glove box to hang takeout bags. I cannot tell you how many times I put takeout on the floor of my car and tried to cushion it with whatever I could find and then just pray that it doesnt go sloshing around all over creation.

Its so interesting because this is a fairly elegant solution to a problem that I dont think many people would care enough to address, and I hear you Kyle, oh, who would ever really need a hook for bags. Look. There are a million different ways. A conversation could go and you chose the path that got you banned from the Olive Garden, so I dont really want to hear it. Of course, the car does have issues so one scary thing about this car. Its only happened to me once, but the automatic collision avoidance system not only applies brake brake, and that happened to me once on a road just like this. It must have detected a shadow or something that it thought was an object in the road and it put me in the oncoming Lane: oh shoot you can, you can overpower it yeah, but I mean it was a wide open road and there was no one there. Luckily so I wasnt, you know both hands on the wheel at the time. Oh but uh yeah, so that kind of freaked me out. I ended up. I opened a service request with the dealer and its like: oh thats, normal, like okay. So then I I just started emailing Executives at pollstar and the president Thomas inglebarth Ingle yeah. He got back to me in like 20 minutes, and this was the night before he was gon na, be on the NASDAQ floor ringing. The bell, because they just went public wow, thats, crazy to me that hes checking his email, but anyway um he uh.

So he he replied to my email and he had a car, a a car carrier out to my house, the next day to bring it back for Diagnostic. That is incredible. One of the issues in going with a car like this that Jim told me about and which Ive corroborated from countless forums online, is the problems pollstar has been having with the telematic and connectivity antenna module, otherwise known as tcam its this little thing right here. On top of the car and its responsible for everything, from the GPS to the Bluetooth to your freaking car key now, the problem is that, in rare cases, theyre prone to outages that can range from minor connectivity issues to being locked out of your car entirely its Something pole star is still working on which I imagine is going to be the case for a lot of the companies breaching the electric vehicle sector over time for their part, Polestar has issued over the air updates to fix any problems that might turn up. But if you dont have connectivity, thats, obviously going to be tough, in which case youll have to manually reboot the entire system or have it brought in for servicing and obviously thats a pain in the ass and, if youre part of a human centipede, its a pain In all three now so far, pollstar seems to hold themselves accountable for the software deficiencies, which is something at least because hey you can make excuses or you can make a car that could be an actual player in the EV sector.

But you cant really do both, which brings me back to the central question of what electric cars mean to different people, because the notion of this mythical person who hates electric vehicles and resents their growth feels like an arbitrary construct. A straw man thats a substitute for hating the people who drive them or, crucially, a substitute for how people make them feel for not driving them. Why do you think so many YouTubers put out long essays about the Last Jedi. A lot of them felt condescended to they felt like it was taking a thing they liked and making them feel foolish for ever having liked it and then being told they just didnt understand what a bold deconstruction it was and look. I, like the Last Jedi Im, a dork myself, but I kind of see where theyre coming from and its kind of the same deal with electric vehicle people who resent EVS, probably resent being made to feel like theyre, somehow less than for not driving one which further Gets them to dig their heels in on the notion that, even if the car itself isnt bad its still the sole domain of self righteous self important people and what is hell, if not other people cheap plug, I know, but I was recently interviewed by Reuters for An article on electric vehicles and Im, not even sure, theyll use the quote, but it was something along the lines of how electric vehicles get treated like the boogeyman to enthusiasts, when theyre, really just another evolution in an industry that has always been changing and realistically change.

Should challenge you and whether you worship at the altar of internal combustion, even the most died in the wool Gear Head, should be able to find something to love about an EV, provided you give it a real chance, but that willingness seems inextricably tied to meaning to The desire to understand what the point of an electric car even is when internal combustion is still here and capable of doing everything, a driver could need it to do its easy to just imagine a guy whos combing, his mustache and Hiking up his Dockers and spitting Into a juice cup, while proclaiming loudly that its the Fancy Pants Community, pushing EVS on everyone else and living by the Mantra that again, hell is other people. But how do I explain this? Hell is only other people for as long as we allow other people to dictate how we feel about the world we live in. You cannot control other people, but you can control yourself. You can try anyway, you dont have to let snotty attitudes dissuade you from seeing the inherent value of an EV, even if youre still holding on to internal combustion, with both hands like a failing marriage that youre just trying to run out the clock on until your Mother dies and she can go to her grave, knowing that her son wasnt living without the benefit of matrimony and look, I hate change. I hate it so much in a lot of ways.

Im part of the problem grasping in the dark for meaning overthinking, a concept like electric vehicles and feeling of vague Security in the notion that cars will remain cars exactly as Ive known them, holding on to the notion of a comfortable familiar status quo. But what happens when the thing you wanted to hold on to for ever lets you go when that time comes, and hopefully before you find meaning in life within yourself or else nothing will ever fulfill you so hell isnt. Other people hell is whatever we make it for. However long we choose to Stew in the emotions that sustain that hell and Im, not saying dont feel things but dont stew in it. You know, emotions are evidence of things. Having happened to us bad things, yes, but good things too, the Quilted experiences of our lives are woven from a coarse fabric that softens over time into something resembling a story. I guess Im saying all this: to bring it back to the point that, for whatever its worth, automakers are still trying to write the story of electric cars to figure out how all people fit into that narrative. The people who are open minded about electric vehicles and those who are maybe less than convinced and its a path thats going to be fraught with trial and error. But I think the pole, star too, achieves something resembling a baseline for an EV that even the staunchest critic would probably have a hard time complaining about its, not the fastest EB, but it rides smooth and has great acceleration.

It doesnt have the best range, but its better than Factory claims, its comfortable as all hell and in moments its fun. I dont know that EB, loyalists are going to love this, but then I never felt driving this that thats, who this was targeted at reaching. Maybe over time, Polestar will refine the model and split the difference, creating something that everyone can really get behind, but for now I think this is a damn fine attempt and your phone charger faces away from you, so you cant look at it: gay Music, foreign Music, Its not the life Im used to this old Fox body teaching something new like how to share Affair.