Part 7 in my Electric Car series.

The car is great! It has quirks and new company problems and controversial design choices, and I am sure it’s not and won’t be for everyone. But I really like it so far, and I suspect I’ll continue to like it for a long, long time. Or until I get “the itch” again and it’s time for something different.

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Perhaps the most obvious thing to like about the car is how it drives, which is amazing. Most of this is due to the electric drivetrain: a nearly perfect 50/50 weight distribution, and AWD. There’s a LOT of weight, in the form of a battery, very close to the ground, so the center of gravity is very low and this makes the car very, very well planted. The 408 HP and 490ish lb/ft of torque are no joke either. It’s not neck-snappingly quick, like I imagine a Plaid Tesla to be, but it is seriously fast, and it will shove you into the seat, HARD. It’s a hoot.

The ride, IMHO, nails the comfort-handling tradeoffs. Against my normal instincts, which mandate that I check every checkbox, and based on many reviews, I did -not- choose the Performance package. The golden Brembo calipers and yellow seatbelts that come with the Performance package look great. By all accounts the package also makes the ride harsher, both because of the adjustable-but-always-firm dampers, and because of the larger wheels with smaller-sidewall tires. With the disaster that Houston streets are, I wanted more rubber and softer shocks. I am 100% confident I chose right on this one. Also I do not see myself crawling under the car with an Allen key to select one of 22 dampening positions manually. The ‘base,’ peasant, ordinary no-name dampers are perfect, and the non-Brembo, boring metal-colored brakes work very, very well.

The other thing to file under “ride” is the vault-like quality of the car. Yes, it’s a Volvo. It feels like it’s carved from a single piece of metal. No flex, no squeaks, nor rattles, nothing. It’s obviously silent because it’s electric, and it’s also decently insulated. My Kia Stinger, which I really liked, developed some rattles and squeaks pretty much immediately. This is a whole other level of solid.

The second thing to like is the driver’s dash with Google Maps built in. Audi did it first, and possibly best, but the implementation here is also excellent. You can turn it off if you want. You don’t want to. It’s so shocking to have an actual Google Maps in the dashboard in front of you, that I keep looking at the infotainment screen for map cues. I still can’t get used to the idea.

More generally, the infotainment system is very good. It’s a beautiful high-res 11″ screen, vertically oriented. For all intents and purposes, it’s an iPad. In shape, size, screen quality, it’s an iPad. Obviously, it’s not an actual Apple device, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s sourced from a high-end electronics manufacturer like Samsung. It runs Android Automotive (not to be confused with Android Auto).

Annoyingly, it doesn’t support CarPlay at the moment; this is going to come Any Day Now™ via a software update. Not supporting CarPlay should be a dealbreaker for me in most cars in this day and age… but Android Automotive is honest-to-goodness Android, made by An Actual Software Company That Really Knows How To Write Software That Works, so the temporary absence of CarPlay doesn’t matter as much. You can install a limited selection of Android apps on the car itself, and they are good. Spotify? Check. PocketCasts? Yes. I prefer Apple Music and Overcast, so Bluetooth will do for audio streaming from my iPhone in the meantime, but it’s perfectly serviceable otherwise.

Obnoxiously absent from the Android Automotive app store at the moment? Waze. Seriously? The single best driving app, from Google itself, and it isn’t available for Google’s car OS? This one’s a head-scratcher. Google Maps is great, and I love it, but Waze is miles better. If it’s integrated with the driver’s dashboard, it’d be unstoppable.

Also annoyingly, but perhaps more understandably absent? Apple Music. Before you laugh at me, yes, there IS an Android version. I imagine the worldwide market for “Apple Music running on Android Automotive” consists of three people, two of which are me at the moment, but I’d appreciate it. Again, Bluetooth will do until CarPlay arrives.

In general, this Android-but-no-CarPlay is representative of the car, and the big tradeoffs that lurk everywhere. You better like the side they land on, or this car won’t be for you.

Another tradeoff: There’s a transmission tunnel. The car’s built on a Volvo platform that includes gas engines. The good part is that Polestar fills the transmission tunnel with batteries, so it isn’t wasted space, and the car sits lower than it otherwise might. Interior space is reduced, in a way that can be slightly ridiculous when you remember there’s no engine or transmission. Me, I genuinely love the feeling of sitting snug in a cockpit-like cabin, so the setup is perfect for me. If you value interior space above all, it will be grating. My rear-seat passengers may also feel less charitable towards the tunnel than I do.

The car is small, which I quite like, but cabin storage space is also scarce. Cupholders, those wonderful American unit-of-car-interior-metrics, are in short supply. There’s one for the driver, and a second one, if you really must, inside the center console. Two for the rear seat passengers in their center armrest. That’s it, and they’re small. There are useful cubbies around the cabin, but they’re tiny.

The 360º cameras are one of the best, if not THE best, implementation I’ve seen. Tradeoff: normal rear visibility is bad. Not atrocious like it was in my Kia Stinger, but pretty bad all the same.

More: the design. It’s stark. I like the idea of reclaimed wood, and it looks nice enough, but it’s stained very, very dark in my “charcoal” interior. The WeaveTech seat fabric is conceptually nice (“vegan leather alternative”), and it seems like it’ll be very durable, but a luxurious feel like actual leather it has not. It reminds me, more than anything, of a waterproof cycling backpack I own.

More tradeoffs: the car comes with USB-C ports, four of them. It’s about time. USB-A has been with us forever, and is impossible to plug in right the first time. This is not a huge thing, but it’s a great future-proofing strategy. However… the car has no 12V “cigarette lighter” outlet in the cabin. None. Zero. Zilch. Nada. There’s one in the trunk, but come on. How will I plug in my radar detector? I won’t for now. This one is straight-up baffling.

The recycled fabrics in the carpet and headliner are nice. The materials from your waist up are nice and soft to the touch, and feel like they belong in a luxury car. The fabric-covered dashboard looks especially nice to my eyes. The lower plastics are cheaper and scratchier.

The controls are pleasant to use. The wheel, a stock Volvo one with a Polestar logo photoshopped swapped in and color-matched to the accents, is heated (super useful in Houston) and feels great in my hands. It doesn’t have a lot of steering feel, but at least you can select one of three different levels of resistance. The middle setting seems good to me. The wheel is manually adjustable, which is weird in this price range IMHO, and I’d prefer electric and saved to a profile. It depends on how much you share the car, I guess.

The shifter is cool, with a passthrough handle and a lit Polestar logo. It’s more of a sprung toggle than a shifter, but it’s neat. Completely unnecessary in an electric car, but I like shifters.

The thing I expected to totally hate but ended up enjoying greatly is one-pedal driving. I have it set to the highest level, where the car will brake at up to a pretty high 0.3g just by letting go of the accelerator. You don’t need to use the actual friction brakes for most driving. I suspect the pads will last for a long, long time.

The car also has a totally useless but cool-looking lit logo that gets projected onto the glass roof.

Beta

As much as the driving experience is wonderful, and the car is clearly well thought out, there’s a lot of software stuff that should be labeled “beta” or even “alpha.”

It turns out that, despite my previous assertion, you can use your phone as a key. It uses Bluetooth Low Energy and detects your phone next to the car, treating it like another physical key.

Or it would, if it worked. Mine just won’t. At the beginning, it wouldn’t pair with the car. The dealership warned me about this – it can take 24-36 hrs after a software update for you to be able to pair a phone. Why? I have no idea. Maybe there’s a bored elderly bureaucrat in Stockholm that has to click “godkänna” (approve) on each car’s entry in a database after each upgrade. I named him Herr Karlsson, by the way. The bureaucrat.

Once it paired, which I’m pretty sure I did correctly, as my phone can do other car things… it won’t work. The app has all the permissions it needs. I restarted the phone, the car, and all radios in both. But the car never recognizes it. I suspect that this may ‘heal’ over time, much like the pairing itself, once Herr Karlsson godkänd.

I’ll contact support eventually, if I can’t make it work myself after a few days. But there’s a reason I buy cars on terrible websites. I don’t want to talk to humans, and go “yes, I turned WiFi on and off, even though the key doesn’t use WiFi and this doesn’t make any sense. Yes, I rebooted the phone, no, I’m talking to you from a different phone, I wouldn’t dream of lying to you.”

The car also just wouldn’t see my WiFi network. Annoying, because it’s useful to download software, offline maps, etc. I have a good mesh network; my phone reported full signal inside the car, and worked normally. But it just wouldn’t. I spent an entire hour poking at it. No. I set up a separate network. No. I read things online, that suggested the car needed a 2.4 GHz network with a different name than a 5GHz network. I provided one. Nope. Fiddled with settings like channel width. No. I could see my neighbors’ networks perfectly fine, by the way, or use my iPhone in hotspot mode, so there was nothing dreadfully wrong with the car’s hardware or software.

In the end, I think the problem is that the car is incredibly picky about signal strength. I fixed this by plugging an extension cord behind the freezer in the garage, and precariously perching an old unused WiFi extender on top of said freezer. With a ‘fresh’ signal coming from only a few meters away and no walls in between, it became a happy camper. Herr Karlsson must be smiling.

There’s more to talk about, but this is long enough already. I’ll take better and more photos in the near future, and update the annoyances.

TL;DR

I like the car very much, and driving it is a hoot. However, it has plenty of “first product from a new company” issues, and some baffling design choices. Most of them should be fixed by software updates… eventually. I strongly recommend reading as much as you can and looking at it very closely if you’re considering it.

I traveled to Austin on Monday, and picked up my new Polestar 2. Hooray! It’s part 6 in my Electric Car series.

This is going to be such a long one, I split it in two more pieces.

Travel

I needed to get there without driving, and public transportation in Texas isn’t great. The usual option is to get a friend to drive you; for some reason most Texans, and Midwest transplants , seem to think that driving three hours each way is nothing. My spouse doesn’t drive long distances, and my friends are busy, so that was not a real option.

To make a long story short, I took at Vonlane bus. It’s a small Texas company that serves Dallas, Austin, San Antonio, Houston, and nothing else. They travel from downtown to downtown, which is quite handy, and have huge quilted leather seats, WiFi, and an honest-to-goodness attendant that’ll bring you snacks or, in my case, an unlimited stream of coffee. It’s not cheap, but I’ve used them before and like them.

Once in Downtown Austin, I took a Lyft to the dealer.

The dealer

It’s a truth generally acknowledged that luxury car dealers are slightly less crappy than normal car dealers. In my experience with Infiniti, BMW, Mercedes, Acura, and now Volvo, this bears out.

The “Polestar Space” in Austin is virtual; it’s just a sign in the Volvo dealer. It’s not a separate space at all. It does have its own salespeople, and they were pleasant to work with, if hard to find; they kept scurrying off to meetings and generally being kind of absent. The sale process was slow but mercifully free of upselling or ‘dealmaking’ or sneaky fees. The sale price was what was on the website, and that was that. Since I had done everything through the website, there wasn’t much for the salesperson to do other than verify that I had insurance, confirm the details, and give me a COVID-appropriate fist bump.

Except that then he handed me off to “the finance guy,” who took a long time to arrive.

I don’t know why, but as much as I fear the salespeople, dealmaking, and getting generally taken advantage of by dealerships, the finance guys don’t scare me at all. They just bore me. It’s probably the “the deal is done and this is all strictly optional” aspect, but I have no problem turning down the slightly ludicrous stuff they offer. The best one was, IMHO, something like a $2500 maintenance package… for an electric car that doesn’t even need a first maintenance visit until it hits 2 years or 20,000 miles. No thanks.

The only surprise here, and I think this was a genuine error, is that the website miscalculated the sales tax on the car by omitting them. I’d be more suspicious of this, but it also double-counted another item, inflating the price artificially, which the finance guy actually caught and lowered. It took us both about 15 minutes of reconciling statements to make sense of all this. I mentioned before that the website was terrible. It can’t even add properly. Apparently they’re redoing it from scratch. I very much hope so.

Then, more waiting. The car got a software update, a last checkup, detailed, and charged. This whole thing took hours so they loaned me a different car to go get lunch. After I returned, I spent my time working from their lobby (terrible WiFi) and chasing the stealthy salesman to ask him when my car would be ready.

Get to the car already!

Next: Fine.

Part 5 of my ongoing Electric Car series.

Fixing my mistake with the Mach E order would cost $5,000 extra, plus taxes (for the extended-range battery) and another trip to the awful dealership, including redoing the price negotiation. No way. Life’s too short for that stress.

The Polestar 2 was my second choice for an electric car. It’s very comparable specs-wise to the Mach E, except that when Ford zigs “Comfort” Polestar zags “sustainability”. The car’s no slouch, with 408 HP in its AWD configuration, and neat touches like reclaimed wood for the dashboard, carpet made from recycled water bottles, and a fabric they call “WeaveTech” for the seats that they position as a modern, sustainable luxury alternative to leather.

I saw it described in an online review as “imagine if BMW tried making a car out of Volvo parts,” and that is where I got the title for this post.

Polestar is really trying to be a Tesla alternative. It’s a joint venture between Geely and Volvo (itself owned by Geely; Polestar was structured this way for boring organizational reasons). It went public recently via a SPAC; I don’t care one way or another, but I state it for completeness.

Volvo lends its design expertise, safety chops, and nice switchgear to Polestar cars. This is relevant only because I recently drove a newish Volvo S60, and I absolutely loved it. Polestar 2s are manufactured in a Volvo plant in China.

Polestar doesn’t have “dealers” but it has “spaces.” They’re… dealers? that hold court in carved-off sections of Volvo dealerships. There aren’t a lot in the country yet. The closest one to me is in Austin. They don’t seem to get the level of pricing control that Ford, or other traditional dealers get.

You order a Polestar online (when the website works, as it tends not to), arrange financing online, and you get an actual price online. I know these things because I ordered one. It turned out that Polestar Austin had the exact configuration I wanted in stock, so I won’t have to wait weeks. A very calm person from the Polestar “space” in Austin called me, just to confirm I was real and understood I was buying a car (do people just click on these things at random‽) and to arrange delivery. I decided to pick it up in person, which sounds a lot more fun than waiting for a truck.

I dig the look. The Thor’s Hammer headlights are straight from Volvo, of course. The grill reminds me of Peugeot, for some reason I can’t quite put my finger on. It’s smaller and taller, I read, that what it looks like in pictures. It’s, in fact, shorter than a Honda Civic!

The car’s a fastback with a somewhat-higher seating position. The non-performance version rides on 19″ wheels, so it should be more comfortable and better able than the performance version to soak up potholes. From all I’ve read, the ride and handling on the non-performance version are top-notch.

I’m psyched to pick it up and drive it home tomorrow. I went for the Plus and Pilot packs (better equipment and driver assists), leaving Performance out; from all I’ve read and watched, the Ohlins dampers in the performance pack are cool but not worth it. I also skipped the actual-leather seats; for one, I’m going with the ‘sustainable’ theme, so the vegan, man-made surface seems more appropriate. Leather’s also $4,000 extra, which is nuts. Unfortunately, it’s the only ventilated option, which I will sorely miss, but pre-cooling the car while plugged in should help soften the blow.

In the end, the car’s a little more expensive than the standard-range Mach E, but cheaper than the extended-range; and knowing I won’t have to deal with a Ford dealer? Priceless. Polestar’s 0% APR will also pretty much nullify the delta with Ford. More range, more power, less money, cooler, quirkier, niche brand. I like it.

Things the Mustang Mach E has that the Polestar doesn’t:

• Bang & Olufsen audio
• BlueCruise
• An extensive dealership network
• Auto-negotiation with chargers (this is a really cool feature)
• A six-month wait
• App as key

Things the Polestar has that the Mach E doesn’t:

• A distinct lack of traditional entitled dealers
• Android Automotive (the Mustang runs QNX, although Ford has committed to Android Automotive; I don’t know how, and if, they’re going to move the Mustang to AA or leave it as a holdout)
• More power and a longer range (compared to the standard battery I was getting)
• Google Maps in the driver’s instrument cluster (I *love* this)
• Immediate availability

Polestar will pick up the car if it needs service, so the lack of a dealership network isn’t such a problem. Plus, an electric car should be extremely reliable mechanically.

Both cars subscribe to the Tesla style of Over The Air software updates that improve features and performance, which I love.

In the end, I’m happy and excited for the outcome. The Polestar 2 sounds wonderful, and I can’t wait to actually try it out and drive it home!

Next: Polestar

Part four in my Electric Car series.

Like many nerds who just made a big purchase, I sat down the next day to read even more about the Mach E. Despite the lousy dealership experience (in part my fault, I don’t know why I had any expectations), I was looking forward to getting the car and enjoying it.

Several articles, and even a few YouTube reviews in (I don’t like the latter much), I stumbled upon a review that mentioned something I didn’t realize. The standard-range battery model of the Mach E, even with AWD, has 80 less HP than the extended-range model. I understand how that can be, but it was weird. How did I not see it before? I rechecked Ford’s specs.

So now, I was waiting six months (theoretically; who actually knows?) for a car I already had bad feelings about, I was suddenly paying the same amount for 80 HP less than I was getting in my head. Although nothing had changed, I was suddenly getting a non-discount. An upcount? Anchoring, it’s a real problem!

Too much.

Time to revisit the other options.

Next: A Chinese-made BMW but with Volvo parts

Part 3 of my Electric Car series.

I already established that I want an electric car, but not a Tesla. What’s left?

The Chevy Bolt. Small, simple, with a small tendency to catch on fire (presumably new ones don’t?). Good price/performance. Excellent for a city car. I seriously considered it, although at my age/with my proclivities, I like “nicer”.

Jaguar i-Pace. Beautiful. Expensive, above my budget.

Audi Q40 e-tron. I quite like it. Too big and SUV-y? “Only” 295 HP in their AWD (Quattro) setup.

I’ve owned two BMWs and they’re verboten in this house, so not that brand.

Polestar 2. What if Volvo built a BMW Series 3 in China, reminiscent (to my eyes) of an ’80s Peugeot? I quite like this one. Quirky, small, looks great to me, nice performance, minimalist in a good way. Not available in Houston though.

Ford Mustang Mach-E. Now we’re talking. Have you seen that Grabber Blue? It looks great.

The interior of the Mach-E looks great too. I like the driver’s instrument cluster, the big vertical screen with a physical volume knob, the use of fabric on the dash, and pretty much everything.

The specs look great, and it is (as far as nice electric vehicles go) relatively affordable. It’s a Ford. It can be serviced anywhere and everywhere, and it’s likely to be relatively reliable. BlueCruise (the Ford version of Cadillac/GM’s SuperCruise) is compelling, although I don’t roadtrip much.

So I ordered one.

The ordering process is clearly meant to imitate, to the extent of Ford’s meager abilities, Tesla’s. You configure the car online; color, options packages, battery size, etc. I chose the Grabber Blue, standard battery instead of extended range (because I don’t roadtrip much), Premium package, AWD (more POWER!). I chose a dealership close to home to handle the actual sale, and for delivery. I put down a $500 deposit, and settled in to wait the 6 months people online say it’ll take.

“To handle the actual sale.”

You see, that’s where Ford’s existence in the real world clashes with its intention to be Tesla. Ford has contracts with its dealers, and franchise laws to deal with. It can’t sidestep them. So that online configuration thing, deposit, and everything, gets forwarded to a dealership to actually sell you the car. Ford, to their -relative- credit tries to explain this through the magic of small print during the online not-sales process. The language is confusing, and Ford tries to have its cake and eat it, too. For example, this is what my not-order looks like on Ford’s website, under “Order Details” [sic]

After a business day, I get a call from the dealer. Please come in to put a deposit down (?) and finalize the sale.

So I go in to the dealer, and get sat in front of a salesperson. He’s pleasant, in that “I’m obligated by contract to be your friend” way that car salesmen have. He’s never sold a Mach-E before. Could I please provide him with my order details? He can’t pull them up in Ford’s system, not even with the order number.

I email him a PDF of the order.

He comes back after a few minutes with a printed “dealership” price page. To my relief, after reading horror stories online of $10-20k (yes, you read that right) dealer markups, they’ve respected the online price and honored my existing deposit. There’s a couple of typical small fees ($120 or so for documentation, etc.), taxes, etc. Total’s $57k and change. Wait, that’s a little too much. Why?

Because… there’s $1500 in “tint, wheel locks, and nitrogen”.

I live in Texas; I need tint. But I can get it elsewhere, and nitrogen is free at Costco (or in 71% of the air…) and I hate wheel locks with a passion. I don’t want these things, much less for $1500. I tell the salesman I don’t want those. He goes to his manager (ugh).

The tint and company stay on the price sheet. The manager claims it’s their profit. I talk to the manager. I explain I don’t want these. He doesn’t care. I get angry. He doesn’t care. I try reasoning with him. He doesn’t care. Do I want the car, or not? I don’t. I leave.

I do want it. Look at that blue! I return. I sign. It’s “only” $1500 for cheap tint. The locks I will remove, and the nitrogen… who cares, it’s not a race car.

But this, for waiting 6 months, for a Ford? It’s soured the experience in my mind. I hate dealerships. Saturn was right, Tesla is right. We shouldn’t buy cars this stupid way.

I leave the dealership angry, disappointed in myself (I don’t like getting angry!), and feeling lousy about the purchase. I’m not looking forward to waiting 6 months for this.

Next: I read more

My children used to love listening to They Might Be Giants’ Here Comes Science in the car. This song stuck with me; it was clear, even in 2009, that electric cars were the future.

The reason I’m writing this is, unsurprisingly, because tomorrow I’ll take delivery of my first electric car.

It’s kind of a big deal for me. I’ve always loved cars, and I love internal combustion engines. They’re awe-inspiring, among the greatest engineering achievements of humanity. It’s a mass-produced device with lots of moving parts that have to function, in concert, in extremely adverse (high pressure, extreme temperatures, sudden changes in both) conditions – and they do so with amazing precision, reliability, and effectiveness.

Really, have you ever considered the fact that thousands of actual explosions are taking place, in an utterly controlled and predictable manner, every single minute a car’s engine is running? And that these devices are relatively affordable? They also make some wonderful, wonderful sounds when working.

BUT. But. These wonders of engineering aren’t exactly great for the environment, and there’s a sense of urgency creeping in that we need to do something, and soon.

A single individual, even a petrolhead’s, individual carbon footprint is minuscule. According to the EPA, approximately 15% of greenhouse gas emissions from US sources (50% of “Transportation’s” 29%) are from terrestrial vehicles. There’s a separate rant here about how Industrial sources, electricity generation, commercial transport, and agriculture are responsible collectively for 72.5%, and how we individuals have been spoon-fed the idea that it’s “our” individual-level fault. Sure, our consumption drives much of the other sources – but industry could clean up a lot easier and in a more centralized fashion that hundreds of millions of homes and light-duty vehicles.

Anyway.

We as individuals CAN do things, even if the impact is small. And if we all do small-impact things, the cumulative impact isn’t small any more.

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Now that I have put all of my eco-worthiness up front, and how enlightened I am about saving the planet, I can tell you the truth: I was bored of my car, and used cars are selling like hotcakes at the moment. So I drove my Kia to Carmax, left with a nice fat check, and started studying the market.

Internal combustion is indeed on the way out. Elon Musk, that incredibly annoying, alt-righty, manchild billionaire visionary called it correctly when he started Tesla, and he dragged the car industry -kicking and screaming, mind you- towards electrification. Many kudos to him for the vision and for executing on it. I think it might end up being an even larger accomplishment than SpaceX.

Next: I don’t want a Tesla.