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  The Polestar Phone. Someday it will unlock your Polestar car. [credit: Polestar ]

Polestar, the Volvo offshoot EV company, has made a smartphone. It's called, predictably, the Polestar Phone , and it's only available in China. There have been a lot of car-brand smartphones out there (it's often Lamborghini ), but usually, these are licensing deals that the car company ignores. Polestar seems to be proud of this phone, though, making it a bit more involved than the usual car-brand licensing deal. Just look at the new navigation drawer on the polestar.cn site, which has four main items: "Polestar 2", "Polestar 3", "Polestar 4" and now "Polestar Phone."

Why would a niche EV brand make a phone? Maybe all that work on the Android Automotive OS made Polestar's engineers really enthusiastic about Android device development. The website, through machine translation, promises the phone was "jointly designed by the Polestar global design team and the Xingji Meizu team in Gothenburg, Sweden, and is decorated with Swedish gold details that symbolize high performance." "Decorated" is probably the best way you could describe Polestar's contributions to this phone since it seems to be a bog standard Meizu 21 Pro with some Polestar branding. It does look beautiful, with a no-nonsense minimal rectangular design and all-screen front, but the same can be said for the Meizu phone this is based on.

So, how exactly is the Polestar Phone related to a Polestar car? Well, both run Android and have all-electric power systems. The phone has a slightly smaller battery than the EV, at only 5,050 mAh (that's something like 18 Wh) compared to the 100 kWh battery of something like a Polestar 4. The car also has the phone beat on-screen size, with the phone packing a pocketable 120 Hz 6.79-inch, 3192×1368 OLED, and the Polestars all sporting big tablet screens.

Enlarge / The Polestar 4 went on sale in China late last year, then in Europe and Australia in January. Now it's North America's turn. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

NEW YORK—On Wednesday, Polestar formally launched its next electric vehicle in the North American market at the New York International Auto Show. Until now, Polestar's range has been a little limited—there was the Polestar 1, a handsome if a little eccentric plug-in hybrid GT that went out of production after just 1,500 examples. And there's the Polestar 2 sedan, now available as a more efficient, more fun rear-wheel drive variant . But the brand has lacked that most popular of body styles, the SUV—until now.

"We have been obviously waiting for this year so much in order to really accelerate now. So the two cars coming are SUVs, [which] is, for us, key to really get into the dimension that we want to be," said Thomas Ingenlath, CEO of Polestar. "We have invested so much into the brand. We have so much invested into being in 25 countries. Of course we need now that kind of scale, a minimum of a three-car company to justify all of that," he said.

The latest addition is called the Polestar 4, which slightly confusingly slots between the smaller Polestar 2 sedan and larger, more expensive Polestar 3—the other SUV that joins the range this year . It has a clear family resemblance to its siblings, with similar front styling to the Polestar 3 and a fastback rear that calls back to the Polestar 2. The decision to ditch the rear windshield will no doubt be controversial—instead, the Polestar 4 uses a camera-based mirror that provides a wider-angle view of things behind the car than a normal passive mirror.

Enlarge / Polestar is running a few months late with its next EV, but US deliveries should begin within the next three months. (credit: Polestar)

Polestar is almost ready to start selling its next electric vehicle here in the US. The Polestar 3 SUV has finally gone into production, and the automaker says deliveries to US customers should start in the second quarter of this year. That's a little behind schedule— in October 2022 we were told that the Polestar 3 would go on sale here toward the end of 2023.

There's just one powertrain at launch, the Polestar 3 long-range dual motor, which starts at $73,400. This offers 489 hp (365 kW) and 620 lb-ft (840 Nm), which should give the EV a range of about 315 miles (507 km) from its 111 kWh battery pack. And Polestar is making the Pilot Pack standard equipment, which includes a heads-up display and some advanced driver assistance systems.

There will also be the Polestar 3 with the Plus Pack, for $78,900. This adds different 21-inch wheels, an upgraded interior with either "MicroTech" fabric or wool covering the seats, heated rear seats to go with the heated front seats, and an upgraded Bowers and Wilkins sound system with 25 speakers and a subwoofer.

Enlarge (credit: StoreDot)

There's a lot to like about electric vehicles. They're quiet, reliable, and about twice as efficient as the most frugal hybrid, not to mention that whole "instant torque" thing. But there's no denying that vehicles with internal combustion engines have a big advantage when driving distances requiring more energy than you set off with. A battery company called StoreDot may have a solution, though—an extremely fast charging cell that could add 100 miles (160 km) of range in just five minutes. And its pack will be tested in a Polestar 5.

More than a century has conditioned us to think that refueling a car should take just a few minutes, so the 30–60 minutes that most EVs require to fast-charge seems offensive to many motorists. And that's assuming the chargers work flawlessly— far from a safe assumption in 21st century America, unfortunately.

Right now, most automakers' solution to this problem is to throw lithium-ion at it, building EVs with such big battery storage capacities that an unaerodynamic pickup truck could go more than 400 miles between plug-ins. There are, of course, problems with this approach.

Enlarge / When you see a brightly colored triceratops by the side of the road you should probably check it out. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

DENVER—A car's midlife refresh is, more often than not, a mostly cosmetic affair—new light clusters or a changed front fascia, perhaps a new interior. Truth be told, the styling tweaks to the model year 2024 Polestar 2 are subtle—you might notice new wheel designs, and the ersatz front grille has been replaced with a body-colored panel. Instead, Polestar concentrated on tweaking the bits you can't see, making the car more efficient and, in the case of the cheaper, single-motor version, a lot more fun to drive, too.

When Polestar first launched the Polestar 2 in 2020, it did so with a dual-motor all-wheel drive version , followed by a more affordable single-motor model . Although the more expensive, more powerful version was faster, as is often the case with electric vehicles, I found the supposedly lesser car the one to go for. It's this version that has had the most attention paid to it in the refresh, most notably the fact that its single motor now powers the rear wheels, not the front.

The Polestar 2's interior is little changed, but that's good because we already loved it. The Android Automotive infotainment system includes Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

Polestar has developed a new electric motor that's significantly more powerful than the one it replaces, outputting 299 hp (220 kW) and 361 lb-ft (490 Nm). That's a 29 percent boost in power and 48 percent more torque than the previous single-motor model.

Enlarge (credit: Aurich Lawson | Getty Images)

The mass sponge EV charger plug migration continues to gather steam. Since we last wrote about the topic, first Polestar and then Mercedes-Benz also announced that they're dropping the Combined Charging Standard 1 (CCS1) connector in favor of Tesla's North American Charging Standard (NACS) . Sometime next year, non-Tesla electric vehicles from those makes, as well as Ford , General Motors , Volvo , and Rivian , will be able to start making use of Tesla's Supercharger network. In 2025, those automakers—and probably a few more—will start building cars with NACS ports built in.

It's not just the car makers. Charger manufacturers and charging networks have also been announcing new NACS products, and it feels like enough critical mass is building that CCS1 might be headed for extinction. Or at least it may be relegated to curio status alongside CHAdeMO. Things are looking even better now that SAE International is taking over the management of NACS, so it will no longer be under the control of a rival OEM run by a billionaire known for impulsive and often arbitrary decisions. At this point, many are merely waiting to see if Hyundai Motor Group or Volkswagen Group will be the next big convert.

The justification for dropping an entrenched standard and switching to NACS, from Ford and others, was as much about obtaining access for their EV owners to Tesla's Supercharger network, and why not? Even the most hardened partisan from the EV brand flame wars has to concede that not only are there far more Superchargers out there, but they offer a vastly superior charging experience to any of the public charging networks.