Polestar shows off the aluminum EV platform for its new flagship

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The skeleton of a car is so light that a man in reflective gear can pull it in a cart.
Enlarge / A Polestar 5 chassis being wheeled around Polestar’s R&D center.

At some point this year, we expect to see Polestar’s next electric vehicle. It will be an electric SUV built in South Carolina, and it will be called the Polestar 3. But today’s news is actually about the Polestar after that SUV. This flagship will be an elegant four-door coupe called the Polestar 5.

We’re not expecting the Polestar 5 until 2024, but it should put a lot of the ideas shown off in the Precept concept car into production.

And on Tuesday, we got our first look at the car’s skeleton. To date, Polestar has used platforms developed by Volvo; the Polestar 1 GT shares a Scalable Product Architecture (SPA) platform with bigger Volvos like the S60 and XC90, and the Polestar 2 shares its Compact Modular Architecture (CMA) platform with the Volvo XC40.

Those older vehicle architectures were designed to be powertrain-agnostic, with plug-in hybrid (SPA) and fully battery electric (CMA) versions alongside internal combustion engine-powered variants.

The Polestar 5's chassis is being developed in Coventry, UK, but the car will be built at a carbon-neutral factory in China.
Enlarge / The Polestar 5’s chassis is being developed in Coventry, UK, but the car will be built at a carbon-neutral factory in China.

For the Polestar 5, the company’s Coventry, UK-based R&D team has developed a brand-new bonded aluminum platform in-house. And this one is designed from the ground up to be an EV, with none of the compromises that are needed to accommodate a fossil fuel powertrain.

The car’s body and platform are being developed together, and Polestar says the body in white should be class-leading in terms of weight and efficiency. And thanks to its highly rigid structure, the Polestar 5 should handle keenly as well.

“We knew we wanted this car to be lightweight, we knew we wanted high quality, and we knew we wanted it quickly,” said Pete Allen, head of Polestar UK R&D. “This architecture delivers outstanding dynamic and safety attributes, with low investment technology applicable to high production volumes.”

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1834508