- Owner reveals the good and the bad after 100,000 miles in a Polestar 2.
- The Polestar 2 is a Chinese-made, Swedish-designed electric sedan.
The Polestar 2 was the Swedish-based automaker’s first all-electric mass-market car. And for a good few years, it was one of the fiercest competitors to the Tesla Model 3–but then Polestar announced the only version of the 2 available in the United States from 2025 will cost over $65,000.
By contrast, the fastest Tesla Model 3, the Performance All-Wheel Drive, costs $10,000 less, which is a lot of money. The difference is even bigger when looking at the base Model 3, which retails for $42,490 without destination fees.
Nevertheless, people like Robert Dunn from the YouTube channel Aging Wheels bought a Polestar 2 and have very positive thoughts about the Chinese-made EV. In Dunn’s case, his Polestar 2 has recently passed the 100,000 miles mark, which means a lot of stuff had the chance to go wrong–and the battery warranty has ended.
So, how did this Chinese-made, Swedish-designed electric sedan hold up after two and a half years and so many miles? In short, pretty good.
When it comes to battery health–which is possibly the most important metric for EVs–this particular Polestar 2 is currently at 88.8% battery health, according to the diagnostics software used by Robert Dunn. When the car had 77,000 miles on the clock, the battery state of health was at 91.5%.
In reality, the degradation led to a range loss of around 20 miles when driving from 100% to 0% state of charge, but Dunn rarely does that. Instead, he said he’s almost always keeping the battery between 10% and 80%, and the range loss isn’t really a big deal.
When new, this Polestar 2 Dual Motor Long-Range had an EPA-rated driving range of 249 miles. It has a 75-kilowatt-hour (usable) battery pack and two 150-kilowatt electric motors on each axle. Polestar updated the 2 for the 2024 model year, when it got a bigger battery and a single-motor version that was rear-wheel drive instead of front-wheel drive.
Inside, the car still looks pretty much like new, provided it’s clean. There’s a bit of discoloration on the driver’s side speaker grille, where the driver’s knee rests. Also, the cushion on the driver’s side door isn’t a cushion anymore because he always rests his elbow there when driving.
The yellow seatbelts are getting dirty, and the air conditioning is intermittently acting up. when that happens, a simple restart of the car usually solves it. The car also lost the GPS signal once, and it could only be fixed via a diagnostics tool plugged into the car’s OBD port.
There are a series of noises coming from the suspension and possibly the rear CV shafts, but they’re not as important to warrant a repair, just not yet. Some suspension issues were fixed under warranty for free, but that’s pretty much it. Tires and windshield wiper blades were also changed a couple of times, but that’s perfectly normal for any car, as are the several rock chips on the bodywork and windshield.
