2024 Polestar 2 first drive: Dual motor shines on the road, but the single motor’s range is a big win
As Polestar will begin deliveries of the 2024 model year version of its flagship 2 sedan, we got the invite to Denver, Colorado, to not only test the sporty dual-motor but to also test the automaker’s new single-motor version, which includes rear-wheel drive.
Each day, Polestar ($PSNY) becomes a relatively young EV brand that garners more interest from the general public. Following last year’s Super Bowl commercial featuring the Polestar 2, I personally have had several friends and family inquire about the brand.
Despite realistically only offering one model right now, Polestar has continued to bolster sales and make top brand popularity lists in countries like Germany. As for the Polestar 2, well, I personally am well versed in this flagship BEV, dating back to 2021.
To date, I’ve driven the 2022 Long Range Single Motor Polestar 2, the 2023 Dual Motor, and even the limited edition, high-performance BST 270. In between drives, I’ve covered many details of the Geely- and Volvo-owned automaker, including the four additional EVs in the pipeline that will follow the Polestar 2.
Since January, Polestar has been teasing a RWD version of the Single Motor 2, a first-ever for the company and a real marvel in engineering when you learn more about it. By June, we had learned the pricing of the 2024 Polestar 2 models, in addition to some bolstered specs on both powertrain configurations.
Last week, I got the invite out to Denver to experience the 2024 models myself while taking in the beautiful vistas up in the mountains. Here are my thoughts.
2024 Polestar 2 sees major upgrades where it counts
Right out of the gate, I want to let you know there have been relatively no updates to the interior of the 2024 Polestar 2 compared to a year prior, so today’s focus will be entirely on the exterior, the drivetrains, and of course, the driving itself.
Let’s start with the biggest changes to the model year 2024 sedan: powertrain upgrades. This includes new motors and inverters, in addition to a new configuration in the single motor that improves dynamics. These combine for 16 miles of additional range on the dual-motor Polestar 2, all while using the same 78 kWh pack as the 2023 version.
Other additions you can see above include new performance wheels we were told will carry over as design language in future Polestar models (i.e., the 3 and 4 SUVs). Another feature is the “Smartzone,” which integrates radars, cameras, and other sensors into the front of the EV. This design element was first introduced in the Polestar 3, but the 2024 Polestar 2 models will be the first on the road with it.
Dual motors NEVER get old
For the first half of my drive, I started out in the Long Range Dual Motor Polestar 2, complete with the Pilot, Plus, and Performance packages equipped, meaning I had 20-inch Continental performance tires and the aforementioned forged performance wheels.
While leaving Denver, I immediately tested out Polestar’s Pilot Assist ADAS and found it more than adequate. Polestar’s software, in general, is quite good – just minimalist rather than showy or overly complicated. The company is about style and sustainability, not bells and whistles.
Anyway, once we got out of the proper city and onto some winding roads, it was clear I was once again in a Polestar 2. The 0-60mph in 4.1 seconds may seem a little slow on paper, but it is more than adequate for the average driver, and the acceleration never gets old.
When I was weaving through cars on the highway, I found my acceleration and movement instantaneous, and when I passed anyone up in the mountains, I was extremely confident I could do so quickly and safely.
I really want to point out the dynamics of Polestar’s tuning for a second, especially since it’s so apparent on the 2024 Dual Motor Polestar 2. As I mentioned, I’ve driven performance EVs like the BST 270, but for a mass-produced passenger BEV like the new 2, the Polestar engineers still put a lot of expertise into the handling of the vehicle.
Only a drive for yourself can truly describe it, but it’s so sticky and can hug any turn with ease, making it a joy to drive up the mountains of Colorado. For the 2024 version, Polestar replaced the identical motors front and back and put a larger motor in the rear. This supports a dynamic disconnect that will run a single motor to optimize range, which is listed as 247 miles with the Performance Pack (up to 276 miles without).
Overall, I found the vehicle more playful and sporty compared to my previous drives in other model year Polestar 2s. This one had my heart from the get-go, but you know I had to experience the new RWD in the single-motor to see how it compared.
The new RWD Polestar 2 wins in range and charging
While the Dual Motor version of the 2024 Polestar 2 was quite fun to drive, the single-motor RWD version offered the most dramatic refresh compared to last year’s model. As we’ve pointed out several times since Polestar 2 announced the change earlier this year, this is one of the rare instances we’ve seen an automaker move a motor from FWD to RWD on the same platform.
The weight of the car has changed this year because of its larger battery (82 kWh), and the single-motor trim has been tuned differently, but the suspension is the same, and it is now rear-wheel heavy, making it much more of a joy to drive in my opinion. Polestar’s product launch manager, John Quinn, also pointed out that there is virtually no compromise for consumers in choosing the 2024 single-motor Polestar 2 – unless, of course, they require AWD for their local terrain.
Other upgrades include an increase of 69 horsepower (299 total) and 118 extra lb-ft of torque (361 lb-ft in all). Additionally, the 440V platform can charge as high as 220 kW, charging 10-80% in 25-28 mins – a 20% speed increase, according to Polestar.
The biggest perk, however, is the single motor’s 320-mile range. Adding 60 miles of EPA range in a refresh is a huge jump, plus getting over the 300-mile hump goes a long way with prospective consumers who still think they need more range than they actually do.
The second half of the drive was all downhill, going back the exact way I had come up, just with one less motor beneath me. The single-motor version of the 2024 Polestar 2 was more than adequate, but it was a tougher transition to go from the dual-motor, in my opinion. The acceleration was still good, but it lacked the oomph of the dual-motor for obvious reasons.
Still, the dynamics were top-notch, as they always are with Polestar, and I still had no trouble passing Toyotas and other slow vehicles on straightaways. There were some hairpin turns on the way back down, and the single rear motor made for a fun configuration to get the tires squealing and whip that back end around a bit. That’s much harder to do with two motors, so I’d say that was another perk.
Pricing and availability of the 2024 Polestar 2
Compared to previous model years, pricing of the Polestar 2 has gone up, but you’re getting more bang for your buck this year, especially when you consider that the 2023 refresh was mostly aesthetic.
The new RWD, single-motor version of the Polestar 2 starts at $49,900, while the dual-motor version starts at $55,300. Note this includes the Pilot Pack standard but will cost an additional $5,500 for the Performance Pack (also includes Plus Pack valued at $2,200).
Also, note prices do not include $1,400 destination fees.
Orders are open now on Polestar’s website, with deliveries expected in November 2023 if you order today.
Electrek’s Take
Overall, I’m a much bigger fan of the Dual-Motor Polestar 2 because it’s simply more fun to drive. That being said, logic tells me the single motor is the smart play because of its lower price and it’s still fun to drive. That range too. I think that will go a long way with buyers and has the making to further expand Polestar’s brand recognition to the masses.
Price remains a hurdle for this automaker, in my opinion. I’d describe it as a premium brand but not a luxury brand. The performance you get is absolutely competitive but not industry-leading in any category.
What Polestar is selling, however, are beautifully designed BEVs that are built with sustainability in mind. Creating beautiful interiors that are still sustainable is tough, but this automaker has it down to an art form.
Tuning is also a huge selling point for Polestar as I believe the 2 always offers some of the smoothest feels when driving, but how do you relay that to consumers aside from test drives? Overall, this is a big refresh for Polestar, which is nice to see, considering it has its hands full with four (or more) additional EVs coming each year. It’s nice to see they’re just letting the Polestar 2 drift away like we’ve seen with other flagship EVs like the Nissan LEAF.
Go give this one a drive, preferably on some winding roads if you have any near you. I’m interested to hear what you think.
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The electric box van experts at Harbinger announced a new, EREV version of their medium-duty van that pairs a big battery with a small, gas-powered ICE engine to offer fleets that are hesitant to electrify a massive 500 miles of autonomy on a single charge + tank.
The American truck brand is putting its latest $100 million raise to good use, developing a cost-competitive EREV chassis that marries a low-emissions 1.4L inline four-cylinder gas engine with a close coupled 800V generator sending power to a 140 or 175 kW battery for up to 500 miles of fully loaded range. More than enough, in other words, to meet the needs of just about any fleet you can think of.
That’s a good thing, too, because medium-duty trucks are put to work in just about any circumstance you can think of, as well – a fact that’s not lost on Harbinger.
“Medium-duty vehicles serve an incredibly diverse range of applications, just like the fleets and operators that rely on them, ” explains John Harris, Co-founder and CEO, Harbinger. “There are some fleets whose needs simply can’t be met with a purely electric vehicle—and we recognize that. Our hybrid is designed for use cases and routes that go beyond what an all-electric system typically supports. The series hybrid delivers the benefits of an electric drivetrain, along with the added confidence of a range extender when needed.”
In addition an up-front cost that should make it an attractive prospect for fleet buyers, the new Harbinger EREV pack performance that should made it attractive for its drivers, too. The new chassis’ electric powertrain delivers 440 hp and 1,140 lb-ft of tq for quick acceleration into traffic and smooth running, even under load. Charging performance is also quick, with the ability to get the big battery from 10-80% charge in just under an hour on a 150 kW port.
You’ve heard all this before
If that sounds familiar, that’s because it is. This medium-duty chassis was first shown last year, making its debut under a Thor Class A motorhome concept that we covered in September. That vehicle promised the same great EREV range and capability to a market that values independence and spontaneity more than most, and bringing those values to a medium-duty commercial market that’s lapping up “messy middle” propaganda from Shell NACFE is just smart business.
The new Harbinger chassis’ batteries are manufactured by Panasonic. No word on who is making the 1.4L ICE generator, but my money’s on the GM SGE four-cylinder last seen in the gas-powered Chevy Spark. You guys are smart, though – if you have a better guess who the supplier might be, let us know in the comments.
SOURCE | IMAGES: Harbinger.
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Environment
Trump wants coal to power AI data centers. The tech industry may need to make peace with that for now
President Donald Trump wants to revive the struggling coal industry in the U.S. by deploying plants to power the data centers that the Big Tech companies are building to train artificial intelligence.
Trump issued an executive order in April that directed his Cabinet to find areas of the U.S. where coal-powered infrastructure is available to support AI data centers and determine whether the infrastructure can be expanded to meet the growing electricity demand from the nation’s tech sector.
Trump has repeatedly promoted coal as power source for data centers. The president told the World Economic Forum in January that he would approve power plants for AI through emergency declaration, calling on the tech companies to use coal as a backup power source.
“They can fuel it with anything they want, and they may have coal as a backup — good, clean coal,” the president said.
Trump’s push to deploy coal runs afoul of the tech companies’ environmental goals. In the short-term, the industry’s power needs may inadvertently be extending the life of existing coal plants.
Coal produces more carbon dioxide emissions per kilowatt hour of power than any other energy source in the U.S. with the exception of oil, according to the Energy Information Administration. The tech industry has invested billions of dollars to expand renewable energy and is increasingly turning to nuclear power as a way to meet its growing electricity demand while trying to reduce carbon dioxide emissions that fuel climate change.
For coal miners, Trump’s push is a potential lifeline. The industry has been in decline as coal plants are being retired in the U.S. About 16% of U.S. electricity generation came from burning coal in 2023, down from 51% in 2001, according to EIA data.
Peabody Energy CEO James Grech, who attended Trump’s executive order ceremony at the White House, said “coal plants can shoulder a heavier load of meeting U.S. generation demands, including multiple years of data center growth.” Peabody is one of the largest coal producers in the U.S.
Grech said coal plants should ramp up how much power they dispatch. The nation’s coal fleet is dispatching about 42% of its maximum capacity right now, compared to a historical average of 72%, the CEO told analysts on the company’s May 6 earnings call.
“We believe that all coal-powered generators need to defer U.S. coal plant retirements as the situation on the ground has clearly changed,” Grech said. “We believe generators should un-retire coal plants that have recently been mothballed.”
Tech sector reaction
There is a growing acknowledgment within the tech industry that fossil fuel generation will be needed to help meet the electricity demand from AI. But the focus is on natural gas, which emits less half the CO2 of coal per kilowatt hour of power, according the the EIA.
“To have the energy we need for the grid, it’s going to take an all of the above approach for a period of time,” Kevin Miller, Amazon’s vice president of global data centers, said during a panel discussion at conference of tech and oil and gas executives in Oklahoma City last month.
“We’re not surprised by the fact that we’re going to need to add some thermal generation to meet the needs in the short term,” Miller said.
Thermal generation is a code word for gas, said Nat Sahlstrom, chief energy officer at Tract, a Denver-based company that secures land, infrastructure and power resources for data centers. Sahlstrom previously led Amazon’s energy, water and sustainability teams.
Executives at Amazon, Nvidia and Anthropic would not commit to using coal, mostly dodging the question when asked during the panel at the Oklahoma City conference.
“It’s never a simple answer,” Amazon’s Miller said. “It is a combination of where’s the energy available, what are other alternatives.”
Nvidia is able to be agnostic about what type of power is used because of the position the chipmaker occupies on the AI value chain, said Josh Parker, the company’s senior director of corporate sustainability. “Thankfully, we leave most of those decisions up to our customers.”
Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark said there are a broader set of options available than just coal. “We would certainly consider it but I don’t know if I’d say it’s at the top of our list.”
Sahlstrom said Trump’s executive order seems like a “dog whistle” to coal mining constituents. There is a big difference between looking at existing infrastructure and “actually building new power plants that are cost competitive and are going to be existing 30 to 40 years from now,” the Tract executive said.
Coal is being displaced by renewables, natural gas and existing nuclear as coal plants face increasingly difficult economics, Sahlstrom said. “Coal has kind of found itself without a job,” he said.
“I do not see the hyperscale community going out and signing long term commitments for new coal plants,” the former Amazon executive said. (The tech companies ramping up AI are frequently referred to as “hyperscalers.”)
“I would be shocked if I saw something like that happen,” Sahlstrom said.
Coal retirements strain grid
But coal plant retirements are creating a real challenge for the grid as electricity demand is increasing due to data centers, re-industrialization and the broader electrification of the economy.
The largest grid in the nation, the PJM Interconnection, has forecast electricity demand could surge 40% by 2039. PJM warned in 2023 that 40 gigawatts of existing power generation, mostly coal, is at risk of retirement by 2030, which represents about 21% of PJM’s installed capacity.
Data centers will temporarily prolong coal demand as utilities scramble to maintain grid reliability, delaying their decarbonization goals, according to a Moody’s report from last October. Utilities have already postponed the retirement of coal plants totaling about 39 gigawatts of power, according to data from the National Mining Association.
“If we want to grow America’s electricity production meaningfully over the next five or ten years, we [have] got to stop closing coal plants,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright told CNBC’s “Money Movers” last month.
But natural gas and renewables are the future, Sahlstrom said. Some 60% of the power sector’s emissions reductions over the past 20 years are due to gas displacing coal, with the remainder coming from renewables, Sahlstrom said.
“That’s a pretty powerful combination, and it’s hard for me to see people going backwards by putting more coal into the mix, particularly if you’re a hyperscale customer who has net-zero carbon goals,” he said.
A federal court judge in Michigan has placed the once-promising electric truck brand Bollinger Motors’ assets into receivership following claims that the company’s owners still owe its founder, Robert Bollinger, more than $10 million.
Bollinger Motors first came to fame in the “draw a truck, get a billion dollars” stage of the EV revolution that saw Nikola rise to a higher market cap than Ford for a brief time. Robert Bollinger wasn’t able to capitalize quickly enough to get his trucks into production, though – and a late stage pivot to sell the brand to Mullen Automotive and launch a medium-duty commercial truck doesn’t appear to have been enough to save it.
Now, Automotive News is reporting on some of the more convoluted details of the Mullen purchase deal, with Robert (for ease of distinguishing the man from the brand) claiming that Mullen Automotive owes him more than $10 million for a loan he made to the company in 2024.
Just how Robert ended up giving Mullen Automotive $10 million to take his eponymous truck brand off his hands is probably one of those capitalistic mysteries that I’ll never understand, but Mullen’s response was perfectly clear: they didn’t even bother to show up to court.
Bollinger claims that at least two suppliers are also suing Mullen for unpaid debts. As such, the Honorable Terrence G. Berg has put the Bollinger brand into receivership, and its assets have been frozen in preparation for everything being liquidated. Worse, for Bollinger, the official court filings reveal a company that is really very much doing not awesome:
The testimony and evidence—which Defendant’s counsel conceded accurately reflected Defendant’s finances—showed that Defendant is in crisis. For months Defendant has owed more than twenty million dollars to suppliers, contractors, service providers, and owners of physical space. These debts are owed to parties who are critical for Defendant’s functioning. CEO Bryan Chambers testified that Defendant was locked out of its production facilities on May 5, 2025, and that the owner of the production facilities was seeking to permanently evict Defendant. The Court heard that Defendant had been prevented from accessing its critical manufacturing accounting system for a short time at the end of April 2025, before making a partial payment to restart services.
US DISTRICT COURT EASTERN DISTRICT OF MICHIGAN
I’m not sure if you caught all that, but Bollinger’s CEO has been locked out the company’s facilities and getting evicted, the company is more than $20 million in debt, and that debt is owed to people Bollinger absolutely needs in order to keep going.
You can read the full court decision, which I’ve embedded here, below. Once you’ve taken it all in, feel free to rush into the comments to say you told me so, since I really thought hoped the Bollinger B1 had a shot. Silly me.
Bollinger v. Bollinger case
SOURCES: Automotive News, Justia, Yahoo!.
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