Right now, Polestar has only one car: the Polestar 2 crossover, which you’ll soon be able to rent from Hertz. There was a Polestar 1, but that flagship coupe was discontinued, kicking off the brand’s trend of skipping numbers. Its replacement will be the Polestar 5 sedan, due to launch in 2024. The brand has announced we’ll be treated to a preview of it at the Goodwood Festival of Speed next week.
The Polestar 5 will join the Polestar 2 BST Edition 270, a limited-production performance-minded version of the 2, that will debut at the event. The 5, however, will arrive in prototype guise, clad in a full-body wrap with headlights befitting of a test mule. It sort of looks cooler that way.
Now, if you want an idea of how the Polestar 5 will look when the covers are off, you need only reacquaint yourself with the Precept concept that the carmaker revealed back in the fall of 2020. (I thought it’d been much more recent, but time’s been off for little while now.)
Polestar says that show car is “evolving into” the Polestar 5, like they’re Pokémon or something. The Precept seemed realistic enough for production last time we saw it, inspiring confidence that the exterior of the final product won’t be markedly different. That’d be a fortunate thing, because Polestar makes some pretty smart-looking EVs.
Polestar’s next order of business in building out its roster will be to introduce two SUVs called the Polestars 3 and 4, thus filling out the nomenclature gap. Only after those will the 5 hit showrooms, completing the automaker’s plan to deliver three new nameplates by 2025. Personally I wouldn’t mind trading one or two of them for the O₂ concept: A sleek-looking roadster with a removable metal roof and an autonomous drone that docks behind the rear seats. Polestar’s been more coy about whether that one will eventually get the green light. Who knows; maybe only the drone will.