Good morning welcome to Tech in the Car! I'm Oliver this is the Polestar 2 and today
I'm going to go for a drive we're going to see what it's like in the real world
living with it we're gonna go through the traffic in London try the pilot assist
and then get some nice day our fancy going to an English pub in the countryside so we're gonna
take the car we're gonna go to the countryside we're gonna get a drink and then I'm gonna tell
you what i think about it so let's get on with our drive and see what it's like driving the car
in traffic because there will be traffic because well it's London there's always traffic in London
and to see what the experience is like because lots of people always ask
me about the experience of driving an electric car i get asked questions like
can you drive one every day is the range enough are electric cars too expensive what is the best
value electric car how much does it cost to charge up an electric car i get all these questions
all the time and they're really really good questions so i thought in this video i would
try and answer them for you let's talk a bit about this car first of all the Polestar 2 so the Polestar 2
comes from Polestar who makes EVs exclusively well except for the hybrid Polestar 1 and pulsar used
to be the performance division of Volvo but when Volvo was acquired by Geely in 2010 they decided to
branch full site out into their own EV company and that's where we are now with the Polestar 2.
there's also a Polestar 3 coming shortly which is going to be announced in October 2022 this car
is a dual motor long range and the wltp range is about 280 miles but in my driving around i've seen
around 250 on average with range and that's to be expected electric cars generally don't hit the
wltp range because that range is based on perfect conditions and in everyday driving when you have
the air conditioning on the music on you're driving in start stop traffic or indeed driving
fast on the motorway you're going to lose energy and use energy that is going to affect your range
and one thing that pulsar has which i actually really like on here is there's a range assistant
which shows you your current projected range how much your instant consumption is your driving
style your speed climate control and allows you to put into eco climate mode as well now all of these
things help you see where you are in terms of your range what I'm going to do now is I'm going to
stop and try and charge the car up although i've got tons of range and i'm not about to lose it
there's an ionic 5 by the way check out my video on that car on the channel
so even though I've got tons of range I want to make sure that we're topped off and I want to
show you how it works so i'm going to go to a lidl and little have charging points in their
supermarkets are now one of the biggest frustrations i have as a driver who's driven a lot of evs
is the charging infrastructure i'm afraid to say it is not good enough fact the truth is there's
one ev charger in lidl and yesterday i tried to stop and charge this car i spent an hour waiting
and the one moment i got out of the car because i needed to use the washroom i come back and
somebody else has taken my space and i've lost my position with one charging point now this is a
real genuine issue now our motorway chargers where you have at the services three or four and they're
super fast charging you know 150 350 kilowatts then you're able to get that charging really
really fast so even if there is a queue of cars you'll get into your place and get on
with it pretty quickly there are slower charging points like in supermarkets like in the streets
it's not as easy it takes longer and you have these frustrations now i have no way of knowing
if there is availability on this charging point although google maps do show me that there is
an available point it doesn't show a live update something which tesla do show and hopefully other
car companies will sort that out as well with the infrastructure now fortunately there is plenty of
space here and that's not a problem so that means i can thankfully charge the car which is great to
see because it means i can demonstrate to you how it works but what i've noticed is
what you generally see is if you're trying to charge your car a public charger in the evening
five o'clock six o'clock this is the kind of time when people have finished work and they're
going to use the charging infrastructure and so you're going to be waiting in a queue for it for
potentially quite a while now with an electric car I think one of the main things to consider
is do you have charging at home because if you have charged at home then every night you can
top off your car and it's not a problem but i think if you were relying on public charging of
structure every day you might get frustrated and you might find it annoying that would just be my
thoughts on that anyway let's get this car charged and let's see how it works in the post r2 so here
we are we're at the charging point and one of the frustrating things about this particular
kind of charging point is that it uses an app only there's no contactless pavement or no card payment
so i'm going to download the app which is another app download it set it up set up payment methods
and then use the app to do it which isn't great some of these like i said they do allow
contactless payment which is quicker but one of the frustrations of being an electric car driver
is you need to download those and you need to sort those out so let's get on with that now
so let's have a quick look at this pod point so you can see here we've got our screen here
and you can see here it's giving me some options I don't know if you can see this because it's very
sunny but it says 43 ac and it's got a cross which means it's not working it's broken two chadimo 50
kilowatts and there's an estimation mark which means that's broken and then 50 kilowatts three
which is a ccs the ccs is what everyone really uses nowadays so which is here so this one works
but these two are broken which isn't great is it that uh one of these charges is broken so you know
somebody should probably call that support number and tell them that this is not working on an rig
because you know but this is again one of the problems charging infrastructure is left in this
state where one charging point maybe works turns out in this case it's the one that everybody's
going to use right let's connect this up now so let's open up the charging port down here
there we go and you can see on the pulsar 2 we have the connector here and then if you need
the bottom half of the connector you got that there as well
we don't need it here or do we let's see so these yeah so we do okay so we need
to remove the bottom part here so we've removed the bottom part plug this in here
it's gone yellow now I've trained this on the app so it should start charging
and now it has started charging so it's going to stop charging with the car
doing its thing let's go around and look at the car and see what the car says
so the car now shows it as charging
as you can see here and it's got the charging information it shows how many kilowatts
how many amps how many volts and the current range
i got all the information on here so that's pretty simple to do and then on the
main screen here we've got the information showing you the charging status in a graph so you can see
that now let's be honest that was a bit of a faff i'm not gonna lie in this case i had to connect
it to the car first and then press the button to start the charge all i can say is that you do get
used to it the more you do it but we are charging now and is doing its thing so this car can do
zero to 80 in about 20 minutes so we were 57 so we're gonna see how long it takes to get to 80
and our report back then so we've now charged this to 92 80 took about 20 minutes uh it's
also been 46 minutes you probably can't see that because it's really bright so let's stop it now so
I'm going to stop it here on the screen charging's now stopped
it's gone yellow on here to let you know it's done wait stop press the button pull it out
put it back on here put in the lower part back in there we go
and close it and it's charged and then if we go back around here to the front get in the car
you can see it now says charge level 92 if we go and have a look at our projected range you
can see it's 220 miles our projected range down so fantastic let's now go for drive and see what it's
like in the traffic of london and in this scenario both the lane assist and the pilot assist which is
what also calls it are working which had a bike come in front of me so the car automatically
that didn't slow down and you can see here on the front here in the digital dashboard everything is
yellow to let us know that everything's working and I can take my hand off the steering wheel
shouldn't do this this is naughty but as you can see its steering very very very happily
no problem at all without me putting any pressure on the steering wheel
it's working it's safe it's reliable even though we've got quite a turn in this tunnel here
it's able to turn all the way around without me doing anything and yes I've got my hands
ready to touch over any second my feet are over the pedals don't worry but you can see how it's
working and it's now telling me to hold the steering wheel so this uses a torque-based system where any
pressure on the wheel will automatically let it know that i'm holding the wheel
some other cars such as this audi's work on a capacitive system like your smartphone
where you physically have to touch the steering wheel no matter how much pressure you put on it
but it has to be your hand touching it for it to actually engage and let the car know that you're
holding the steering wheel so it's an interesting bit of technology how they're changing that i
don't know why that is maybe it's EU regulations possibly that seems like the only other reason
because adding capacitive sensors would seem to be a more expensive means of doing things than just
leaving it as it was with the torque-based system where any pressure at all does the job and now the
speed limit has increased to 40 so we're probably up to 40 and the car will happily drive like that
so we're making good progress we've been into the centre of london now let's go out of
london let's drive out of london and let's go to the countryside and let's go to a pub
let's have a pub let's have a drink in the pub and have a nice end of the day and tell you my
thoughts and feelings about this the polestar 2 and what i think about it and don't forget
to watch my full review of this car and my video i did ages ago two years ago showing everything
about this car as well because we got a lot of content on this car on the channel anyway onwards
here i am at the pub i'm gonna have a drink in a minute but i've come with a pulsar too
and i want to let you know my thoughts on this car so it's a really comfortable car to drive
in this trim with 408 horsepower is very fast and I've got about I've done about 60 miles today so
far and I've still got about 150 miles of range left so I've still got pretty good range left and
I charged it earlier from about 50 to 90 in about 40 minutes if I charge it from zero or 10 to 80
it should take around 20 to 30 minutes so that's no problem the only issues I have are charging
infrastructure not being enough charges that are a the big problem that we have not enough charges so you
have to wait for them or they're broken this is a problem so i really do think with electric cars
you want to charge them at home because then you don't have to worry about those things
but inside the car very comfortable very fast very efficient it definitely got some attention people
look at it and ask me questions all about it and i do really really enjoy driving the pulsar too
in fact i've done quite a few videos on the pulsar 2-1 with all the different trims a few years ago
on my channel when i first started and there's a full review going into all of the details as well
on my channel so just click on the boxes up there but this is a fantastically good car that i enjoy
what about the design what about the design well you know it looks kind of sporty but also kind of
boxy it actually very much got the i guess what you would imagine to be the Volvo aesthetic from
the past in which they've done muscular cars are very much something which is eye-catching and
this car is definitely eye-catching some people love it some people don't love it but it's a
a good-looking car that's very distinctive and people recognize it and I think that's a really
good thing so i'm going to go and have that drink now please check out my other videos on
the channel and let me know what you think of the Polestar 2 down below thank you very much