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Cargo capacity is at a premium inside the vehicle, with just 15.5 cubic feet of storage space unless you fold down the rear seats. That said, if you’re looking to haul groceries rather than a lot of butt, this might not be the electric vehicle for you. You might consider the Hyundai Kona electric or the Kia Niro EV instead, as this electric vehicle is definitely not an electric SUV.
The Polestar 2 was awesome going through the twists and turns of the CA-35. With instant access to torque from the electric motors, a flick of the gas pedal at the top of a curve made me explode faster than when I entered. This rapid acceleration was evident in normal city driving both in the relative hustle and bustle of downtown San Francisco in the middle of the morning and in the sleepy, stuffy sprawl of the Los Gatos suburbs. The one-pedal drive system has proven to be very useful in light city traffic, allowing me to automatically slow down to crawl just by putting my foot on the accelerator. This feature can be turned off if you prefer a two-pedal driving experience. I had no problem keeping up with traffic whether it was on city streets, multi-lane boulevards or at highway speeds. Mostly at highway speeds. It easily kept pace with the traffic, even when the flow may have exceeded the posted speed limit.
Polestar / Beadyeye
Your biggest concern will be to make sure the lane next to you is clear when trying to pass as the Polestar 2’s blind spots are large enough to hide a MAC truck. The A-pillars are wide, as are the B-pillars. Additionally, the side mirrors have been minimized to lower the coefficient of drag, but they only give you a small glimpse of what is in the lane next to you. . I would gladly take the reduced range if that meant I could see the traffic around me better from larger mirrors.
The centerpiece of the Polestar 2 is the vehicle’s sophisticated center console. It replaces virtually all buttons, dials, and switches with an 11-inch display running one of the first versions of Android Automotive OS available to third parties. Aside from the window and mirror controls, door locks, and gear shifting, everything is handled by what looks like an iPad Pro in portrait mode and crammed against the front of the dashboard. I’ve never been a big fan of these kinds of controls. The idea of going through multiple submenus on a glorified tablet while cruising through rush hour traffic has always given me the heebie-jeebies, but the AAOS system is remarkably simple and intuitive. I never typed more than twice to access the control I was looking for.
Polestar / Beadyeye
That’s not to say there isn’t a learning curve. I spent 10 sweltering minutes in 98 degree weather trying to turn on the air conditioning for the first time, but after that the process took a few seconds. And to be honest, I just couldn’t have been stubborn and said, “Hey Google, turn on the air conditioning and set the temperature to 68 degrees.” Because it also works and it’s pretty cool.
Usually when you pair your smartphone with your car’s infotainment system, it just mirrors the functionality of the phone. AAOS, on the other hand, is a stand-alone system, which means you won’t have to physically plug your phone into it – although you do need a Bluetooth connection to make calls and send texts.
Instead, you simply link the infotainment to your Google account. This allows for a deeper degree of integration, allowing drivers to use their preferred options when dealing with Maps for navigation, Google Play for media, or Assistant for voice assistance. Also, according to the Polestar press kit, if you already have a Google Home, congratulations, your Google account already has a bunch of recordings of your speech patterns so that the infotainment system will understand you more clearly from the start.
“From a safety perspective, similar elements that we have on the phone are elements that also exist in the vehicle,” Haris Ramic, Google product manager for Android Automotive, told Engadget. “For example, you can set it up, if you lock your account, it’s encrypted. And [to access that encrypted data] you have to enter a pin code in the vehicle or sometimes do something on the phone [such as 2-factor authentication] to open it. When the vehicle stops, the user’s partitions, which is the area where all user information is stored, is also encrypted. “
In addition, Google is cautious about which companies are allowed to access APIs for its new operating system. “The objective is obviously not to focus only on large companies because innovation can come from anywhere. We don’t want to provide a set of APIs that everyone can use, ”Ramic continued. “But part of the reason we’re going so slow is that, rather than just opening it all up and saying anyone can develop whatever they want, we’re targeting areas where we know there is. a lot of value for the consumer. ”
Signing in to the infotainment system is not a requirement, mind you, it will work just fine without your credentials, but not with the same degree of personalization (and exposure to data privacy) as if you did. were doing. During my test drive, I used a generic account provided by Polestar and paired my phone via Bluetooth. So even though he couldn’t play songs from my Google Music account, I still had easy access to Maps, Assistant, and Spotify.
Polestar / Beadyeye
The assistant was surprisingly efficient and intelligent for the four or more hours I had to play with. I didn’t have to manually enter a destination, I just told the Assistant where I wanted to go and the system automatically generated a route. It was good, way easier than the boating experience we saw with the Cooper SE in January. The assistant was generally not bothered by background noise, responding quickly to sounds coming from the Polestar’s 16-speaker Harmon Kardon stereo system and only really got bogged down when trying to understand me as I shouted commands with the windows down at highway speed.
It returned some incorrect results when I asked it to play specific bands. For example, when asked to play The Coup, Spotify loaded “In the Coupe” by Curren $ y and Harry Fraud instead, or when I asked for Chika, I got Chica. And yet, when I asked for Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, the system correctly loaded “Return to Zero” without hesitation. Whether it’s a flaw in Assistant’s ability to analyze language or that Spotify just doesn’t have these artists in its catalog, it’s something I couldn’t discern in the few hours that I was there. got the car. But it definitely took me a long time to get access to my existing Google Music playlists.
One issue I ran into was the fact that media streaming requires a 4G / LTE connection and as I made my way through the Santa Cruz Hills I often ran into service dead zones that cut the music right up. ” that the signal is restored (fortunately this applies to streaming services like Google Music or Spotify as well as to FM and AM radio stations (which are also broadcast via a built-in app because AM radio signals make havoc with EVs.) Fortunately, you can easily get around this problem by making a hard connection between your phone and the system through one of the four USB-C ports and playing media content directly from the hard drive of the phone if you don’t want to risk it.The console also offers a 15W charger for induction phones.
Volvo’s influence (as part owner of the brand) is manifested in the wide range of safety and driver assistance functions of the vehicle. It will feature ADAS level 2, namely Pilot Assist (which is already deployed in Volvo models like the V60 and XC90) – it provides acceleration, braking and steering up to 81 mph; blind spot, rear collision and cross traffic alerts; Lane Keeping Aid, Collision Mitigation and Avoidance. It even keeps an eye on the driver to make sure they stay focused on the road. That’s not to say it has cameras monitoring the driver or anything, the attention monitor is based on steering wheel contact. A unique safety feature of the Polestar 2 is its front interior side airbags. These are mounted on either side of the center console and are designed to protect both the driver and passenger from breaking their femurs against the console or snapping into each other in the event the vehicle is hit from the side.
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