2023 Polestar 2 Dual Motor first drive: Limited spec upgrades are offset by a revamped aesthetic
When I drove the 2022 Long Range Polestar 2 Single Motor earlier this year, my biggest wish was to try out the dual-motor version to see what this all-electric sedan can really do. I recently got the chance to test out the 2023 Polestar 2, complete with two motors and plenty of design upgrades compared to its 2022 predecessor. Here are my thoughts.
Let’s start with a very quick refresher course on the Polestar 2. It arrived in 2019 as the second model to debut for the EV-centric brand and its first all-electric option. Since then, the Polestar 2 has continued to grow in popularity alongside the brand behind it, helping set the stage for four additional models that will follow, including the recently debuted Polestar 3 SUV.
This past April, the automaker shared details of the upcoming 2023 version of its Polestar 2, including two new exterior colors. To that note, many of the changes for next year’s model are aesthetic upgrades with a focus on sustainability throughout the build process, an ethos Polestar continues to be celebrated for. Here’s how they break down:
- New exterior colors: Space (metallic black) and Jupiter (gold-gray with red flake)
- New wheel designs (standard 19″ and optional 20″)
- Zinc gray color for ventilated Nappa leather upholstery, available with a new Light Ash deco trim
- Removable sunshade for the panoramic glass roof
- Improved optimal temperature range for heat pump (included in Plus Pack)
- Now between 20°F and 77°F
- Increases real-world EV range in adverse conditions
- Advanced cabin filter and upgraded interior particulate matter sensor with new in-car app
- System quantifies exterior air quality improvement in the cabin
Luckily, I was able to get my hands on the 2023 Polestar 2 (a dual motor this time too) and test it out – here are my impressions.
2023 Polestar 2 shines aesthetically, with few spec upgrades
As you can see from the images above and below, my 2023 version of the Polestar 2 came in the new Space exterior and Zinc interior with light ash deco. This model also came equipped with 20″ 5-V spoke black silver alloy wheels (seen above).
I didn’t really notice a difference between Space and the black exterior of the 2022 Polestar 2 I drove, but the lighter interior with Nappa leather is a major upgrade compared to my last loaner.
The lighter colors offer more of an open feeling within the cabin, whether you’re in the driver’s seat or the back. I usually don’t gravitate toward lighter trim, but in the case of the 2023 Polestar 2, I was thoroughly digging the contrast.
There’s not much else to say about the interior, to be honest, as it is minimalistic in true Polestar fashion. The display layout is the same, although I found the UX a lot easier to use than last time. Especially as it pertained to connecting my own phone via Bluetooth. That being said, it ended up being a lot easier to simply use apps like Google Maps and Spotify on the infotainment system. I still prefer to access apps through my phone using Apple CarPlay, but that’s my personal preference.
Next, we will dig into how the 2023 Polestar 2 drove, but first, let’s give you an idea of some of the performance improvements so you can understand what has changed in a year and what hasn’t. Here’s how both powertrain versions of the 2023 Polestar 2 compare to their predecessors:
| Polestar 2 Model | 2022 Single Motor | 2023 Single Motor | 2022 Dual Motor | 2023 Dual Motor |
| EPA Range | 270 miles | 270 miles | 249 miles | 260 miles |
| Horsepower | 231 HP | 231 HP | 408 HP | 408 HP/ 476 HP* |
| Torque | 243 lb-ft | 243 lb-ft | 487 lb-ft | 487 lb-ft/ 502 lb-ft* |
| Starting MSRP | $45,900 | $48,400 | $49,900 | $51,900 |
| Pilot Pack Price | $3,200 | $3,400 | $3,200 | $3,400 |
| Plus Pack Price | $4,000 | $4,200 | $4,000 | $4,200 |
| Performance Pack Price |
N/A | N/A | $5,000 | $5,500 |
I bolded the specs my version of the Polestar 2 was equipped with, which included the Pilot and Plus Packs, but not the Performance Pack, which offers additional HP and torque. Compared to the 2022 Dual Motor, the 2023 Polestar 2 offers the same performance specs, aside from 11 miles of additional range. (We’ll take it.)
Not the most robust model-year upgrade, but compared to my previous drive in the RWD version, the Dual Motor Polestar 2 is a major step up in performance.
If you get this electric sedan, you’ve gotta go dual motor
As you may recall from my drive in the single-motor Polestar 2 earlier this year, my biggest complaint was its lack of power – a common occurrence in RWD EVs. (Who knew!) The Polestar team heard me loud and clear and made sure I got a dual-motor version this time around.
Having driven both now, I would highly recommend two motors. Polestar’s performance specs are by no means industry-leading to begin with, so you’ll need dual-motor torque and horsepower to truly enjoy the speedy ride this sedan can offer.
Even without the Performance Pack, I was very pleased with the acceleration and drive of the 2023 Polestar 2. I personally love how responsive Polestar’s regenerative braking is, some of the stiffest on the market in my opinion. I’m a huge proponent of one-pedal driving, and the Polestar 2 is perfect for drivers who feel the same. I think I used the brake about three times during my entire time with the EV.
Sitting in the driver’s seat, I found myself a bit low, making it slightly difficult to see other vehicles around me. I didn’t notice that last time I drove the Polestar 2, but I’d call that a minor issue at best. A larger issue for me is the size of the sedan itself.
I still don’t love the compact size of the Polestar 2 for its price tag. While the trunk offers ample cargo room and the seats fold down, I find the cabin itself a little cramped. The front truck is also a bit small for how wide the front end is.
Much of Polestar’s higher price tag relates to premium quality materials, and that’s blatantly obvious if you get inside one. Albeit minimalist, the design of the Polestar 2 is beautiful, well assembled, intuitive, and sturdy.
Personally, I still wouldn’t pay the prices Polestar is charging for either powertrain of the Polestar 2, simply because my EV preferences are focused more on range and nascent technology like 800V platforms, bidirectional charging capabilities, and ADAS. These are categories Polestar could use some improvements in and we could very well see in its upcoming models that have less of parent company Volvo’s fingerprints on them.
All that being said, if I had infinite funds and had to choose, I’d definitely go with the 2023 Dual Motor Polestar 2. Hell, throw the Performance Pack in there too. Who doesn’t love more torque?
Although the Polestar 2 is admittedly not my first choice in a new EV, I cannot deny the granularity of its aesthetic, the quality of its assembly, and the overall smoothness of its ride. If you’re a fan of the brand and its EVs, the 2023 Polestar 2 holds true to its creator’s design progress, and there’s a lot of upsides looking ahead.
I’m very much looking forward to what I get to drive next. I’m thinking it’ll be the Polestar 3, the automaker’s first venture into SUVs. Keep an eye out for that soon!
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Environment
This Meta alum has spent 10 months leading OpenAI’s nationwide hunt for its Stargate data centers
Keith Heyde stands on site in Abilene, Texas, where OpenAI’s Stargate infrastructure buildout is underway. Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, is now leading OpenAI’s physical expansion push.
OpenAI
It wasn’t how Keith Heyde envisioned celebrating the holidays. Rather than hanging out with his wife back home in Oregon, Heyde spent late December visiting potential data center sites across the U.S.
Two months earlier, Heyde left Meta to join OpenAI as the head of infrastructure. His job was to turn CEO Sam Altman’s ambitious compute dreams into reality, seeking out vast swaths of land suitable for expansive facilities that will eventually be packed with powerful graphics processing units for building large language models.
“My in-between Christmas and New Year’s last year was actually mostly spent looking at sites,” Heyde, 36, told CNBC in an interview. “So my family loved that, trust me.”
His life in 2025 has only gotten more intense.
Since January, OpenAI has been quietly soliciting and reviewing proposals from around 800 applicants hoping to host the next wave of its Stargate data centers, AI supercomputing hubs designed to train increasingly powerful models.
Roughly 20 sites are now in advanced stages of diligence, with massive tracts of land under review across the Southwest, Midwest and Southeast. Heyde said tax incentives are “a relatively small part of the decision matrix.”
The most important factors are access to power, ability to scale, and buy-in from local communities.
“Can we build quickly, is the power ramp there fast, and is this something where it makes sense from a community perspective?” he said.
Heyde leads site development within OpenAI’s industrial compute team, a division that’s swiftly become one of the most important groups inside the company. Infrastructure, once a supporting function, has now been elevated to a strategic pillar on par with product and model development.
With traditional data centers nearly at max capacity, OpenAI is betting that owning the next generation of physical infrastructure is central to controlling the future of AI.
The energy needs are hard to fathom. A gigawatt data center requires the amount of power needed for some entire cities. Late last month, OpenAI announced plans for a 17-gigawatt buildout in partnership with Oracle, Nvidia, and SoftBank.
New sites will have to include all sorts of energy options, including battery-backed solar installations, legacy gas turbine refurbishments and even small modular nuclear reactors, Heyde said. Each site looks different, but together they form the industrial backbone OpenAI needs to scale.
“We’ve done this wonderful piece of bottleneck analysis to see what types of energy sources actually allow us to unlock the journey that we want to be on,” Heyde said.
A good chunk of the capital is coming from Nvidia. The chipmaker agreed to invest up to $100 billion to fuel OpenAI’s expansion, which will involve purchasing millions of Nvidia’s GPUs.
‘Perfect wasn’t the goal’
Heyde, a former head of AI compute at Meta, helped oversee the buildout of Meta’s first 100,000 GPU cluster.
In addition to power, OpenAI is assessing how quickly it can build on a site, the availability of labor and proximity to supportive local governments, according to Stargate’s request for proposal.
Heyde said the team has made around 100 site visits and has a short list of sites in late-stage review. Some will be brand new builds, and others will require conversions and refurbishments of existing facilities. Flexibility will be key.
“The perfect parcels are largely taken,” Heyde said. “But we knew that perfect wasn’t the goal — the goal for us was, number one, a compelling power ramp.”
Competition is fierce.
Meta is building what may be the largest data center in the Western Hemisphere — a $10 billion project in Northeast Louisiana, fueled by billions in state incentives. CEO Mark Zuckerberg raised the top end of the company’s annual capital expenditure spending range to $72 billion in July.
The steel frame of data centers under construction during a tour of the OpenAI data center in Abilene, Texas, U.S., Sept. 23, 2025.
Shelby Tauber | Reuters
Amazon and Anthropic are teaming up on a 1,200-acre AI campus in Indiana. And across the country, states are rolling out tax breaks, power guarantees, and expedited zoning approvals to attract the next big AI cluster.
OpenAI is a relative upstart, having been around for just a decade and only known to the mainstream since launching ChatGPT less than three years ago. But it’s raised mounds of cash from the likes of Microsoft and SoftBank, in addition to Nvidia, on its way to a $500 billion valuation.
And OpenAI is showing it’s not afraid to lead the way in AI. A self-built solar campus in Abiliene, Texas, is already live.
While OpenAI still leans on partners like Oracle, OpenAI Chief Financial Officer Sarah Friar told CNBC last week in Abilene that owning first-party infrastructure provides a differentiated approach. It curbs vendor markups, safeguards key intellectual property, and follows the same strategic logic that once drove Amazon to build Amazon Web Services rather than rely on existing infrastructure.
However, Heyde indicated that there’s no real playbook when it comes to AI, particularly as companies pursue artificial general intelligence (AGI), or AI that can potentially meet or exceed human capabilities.
“It’s a very different order of magnitude when we think about the type of delivery that has to happen at those locations,” he said.
Some applicants, including former bitcoin mining operators, offered existing power infrastructure, like substations and modular buildouts, but Heyde said those don’t always fit.
“Sometimes we found that it’s almost nice to be the first interaction in a community,” he said. “It’s a very nice narrative that we’re bringing the data center and the infrastructure there on behalf of OpenAI.”
The 20 finalist sites represent phase one of a much larger buildout. OpenAI ultimately plans to scale from single-gigawatt projects to massive campuses.
“Any place or any site we’re moving forward with, we’ve really considered the viability and our own belief that we can deliver the power story and the infrastructure story associated with those sites,” Heyde said.
He understands why many people are skeptical.
“It’s hard. There’s no doubt about it,” Heyde said. “The numbers we’re talking about are very challenging, but it’s certainly possible.”
WATCH: OpenAI’s $850 billion buildout contends with grid limits
There’s a quiet revolution underway in Cadillac showrooms across America. The brand’s renewed “Standard of the World” ambitions are now matched by sleek, statement-making electric vehicles. And, thanks to a little help from Federal tax credit FOMO, more than 40% of new Cadillacs sold in Q3 were 100% electric.
GM’s overall EV sales numbers were up 110% last quarter, climbing to 66,501 units in the US alone on the back of the affordable, 300+ mile Chevy Equinox and 1,000-mile capable (sort of) Silverado EV – but it was Cadillac dealers that saw the biggest growth in EV sales.
As buyers poured into Cadillac dealerships in the last days of the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit, GM’s luxury arm was ready with stylish, new-for-2025 electric vehicles like the Optiq, Vistiq, and Escalade IQ* waiting for them alongside the Lyriq. The result wasn’t just Cadillac’s best third quarter in more than a decade – Cadillac (and GM) is having one of its best sales year, period.
Here’s what the quarter looked like, by the recently-released GM sales numbers.
| EV MODEL | Q3 25/Q3 24 | Q3 25 | Q3 24 | YTD 25/YTD 24 | YTD 25 | YTD 24 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chevrolet Equinox EV | +156.70% | 25,085 | 9,772 | +389.88% | 52,834 | 10,785 |
| Chevrolet Blazer EV | +1.14% | 8,089 | 7,998 | +36.72% | 20,825 | 15,232 |
| Chevrolet Silverado EV | +97.49% | 3,940 | 1,995 | +78.58% | 9,379 | 5,252 |
| Chevrolet BrightDrop | * | 2,384 | * | * | 3,976 | 0 |
| GMC Hummer EV Pickup | +21.86% | 5,246 | 4,305 | +48.65% | 13,233 | 8,902 |
| GMC Sierra EV | +771.84% | 3,374 | 387 | +1,488.37% | 6,147 | 387 |
| Cadillac Optiq | * | 4,886 | * | * | 9,826 | 0 |
| Cadillac Lyriq | +1.18% | 7,309 | 7,224 | -18.17% | 16,626 | 20,318 |
| Cadillac Vistiq | * | 3,924 | * | * | 5,669 | 0 |
| Cadillac Escalade IQ | * | 2,264 | * | * | 6,030 | 0 |
| Total | +109.91% | 66,501 | 31,681 | +137.44% | 144,545 | 60,876 |
Source: GM Authority / GM Q3 2025 sales report.
That asterisk up there next to the high-rolling Escalade IQ that sold more than 3,900 examples is because, at well over $80,000 even for the most basic model it never qualified for the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit to begin with (nor did the people destined to buy it, who almost certainly make too much to qualify).
It’ll be interesting to see if the loss of that tax credit will do much to negatively impact EV sales in Q4. And that’ll get doubly interesting thanks to the creative accounting team at GM that figured out how to extend that $7,500 tax credit for existing dealer inventory (for a few more months) and that its biggest EV rivals at Hyundai are slashing prices on popular IONIQ models.
You can check out our EIC Fred Lambert’s full review of the new electric Cadillac Escalade in the video, below, and use the following links to find great Cadillac deals near you while that cleverly extended tax credit is still a thing.
Cadillac Escalade IQ review
SOURCE | IMAGES: GM, via GM Authority.
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Tesla is teasing the unveiling of a mysterious new product planned for Tuesday, October 7th this week.
The teaser is ambiguous, which is sparking speculation.
On Sunday, Tesla released a short teaser on X featuring a few seconds of what appears to be a wheel or a fan spinning and ending with the date “10/7”:
Due to the ambiguous nature of Tesla’s teaser, people are speculating as to what the automaker plans to unveil on Tuesday.
Let us speculate.
Electrek’s Take
Of course, Tesla being an automaker, people would quickly think this is a wheel. However, due to the alignment and the lack of lugs, I doubt this is a wheel.
If it has to do with a wheel, it would make more sense for this to be a wheel cover.
A wheel cover could indicate that Tesla will unveil the new, stripped-down Model Y. Timing-wise, this makes the most sense, as we have been expecting Tesla to launch the cheaper Model Y early in Q4.
It could also be a fan. What Tesla product could have a fan?
Elon Musk has been discussing Tesla’s potential development of an HVAC system for a long time, but I haven’t seen significant evidence that Tesla has been actively working on it.
The next-gen Roadster? Maybe Tesla has put some fans for downforce? The timing of that could also make sense, as Musk has been promising a demo by the end of the year. However, we heard that one a few times before.
Several media outlets are reporting that Ferrari is set to unveil its first electric car this week, so Tesla may be looking to steal some of its shine.
What do you think Tesla is teasing here? Let us know in the comment section below.
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