The Polestar 5, the Swedish electric performance car brand’s upcoming flagship fastback sedan, was shown without camouflage for the first time at the inaugural Polestar Day event in Los Angeles on November 9.
Unveiled on stage alongside the Polestar 3 SUV, Polestar 4 crossover coupe, Polestar 6 roadster concept, and the Polestar Synergy concept, the Polestar 5 looks exactly as you expected it to.
It stays true to the design language of the Polestar Precept concept from 2020, but it has been adapted for production, getting conventional side mirrors, regular front-hinged doors, and subtle styling tweaks.
It looks great, but arguably the thing people will focus the most on will be the lack of a rear window. Just like the Precept study, the Polestar 5 features a body color-painted panel where you’d expect to find the rear window. How will that work in the real world? We’ll just have to wait and see, but modern camera technology will probably take care of that.
Since the Polestar 5 will not go on sale until 2025 – we don’t know yet if it will come as a 2025 or 2026 model year – the automaker still has time to work that out. Overall, the electric five-door fastback looks enticing thanks to the coupe-like roofline and sharp design features including the boomerang-shaped headlights and taillights (the latter united by a light bar), the sporty bumpers, and the planted stance.
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Underneath the sleek body, the Polestar 5 features a bespoke scalable aluminum architecture – it will be the brand’s first model to use it – that has been developed in the UK by a team of engineers that includes Lotus and McLaren alumni.
Polestar previously said the platform, built mostly from bonded aluminum, will be the lightest in its class and will have body stiffness similar to supercars, which will likely make the Polestar 5 a direct rival for the Porsche Taycan – albeit a slightly more practical one. The platform will also be used by the Polestar 6 roadster later on.
Polestar has already announced powertrain specifications of its flagship EV last year, with the top variant making up to 871 horsepower (650 kilowatts) and 664 pound feet (900 Newton-meters) of torque from a dual motor AWD powertrain.
The automaker is targeting a driving range of 372 miles and spectacular charging speeds thanks in part to an 800-volt electrical architecture.
We learned recently that the Polestar 5’s lithium-ion battery will be supplied by Korea’s SK On. The EV will feature ultra-long 22-inch (56 cm) cells with a high-performing chemistry (a high-nickel one). According to Polestar, this setup will offer high energy density for “superior driving range,” fast charging, efficient discharging, and “superb safety.”
This likely means that StoreDot’s extreme fast charging (XFC) battery cells are only an experiment for now. A Polestar 5 verification prototype will demonstrate the technology starting next year to see how the cells promising to add 100 miles of range in 5 minutes of charging can be brought to production.
Polestar previously said that the Polestar 5 will be built at a new factory in China, but it’s unclear if that plan is still on the table. Wherever it will be made, it will be joined by its platform sibling, the Polestar 6, from 2026.
Polestar made several important announcements at the Polestar Day event yesterday.
The carmaker revealed that the Polestar 4 electric crossover coupe for the U.S. market would be built in South Korea from the second half of 2025, and provided fresh details about the capability of the Mobileye Chauffeur eyes-off, hands-off ADAS that will debut on the Polestar 4.
The company also outlined plans for a Virtual Power Plant (VPP), a central management system that works with individual Polestar 3 vehicles, leveraging their bidirectional charging capability to supply electricity into the grid when needed.
Finally, Polestar said it will begin testing StoreDot’s extreme fast charging (XFC) battery cells in a Polestar 5 verification prototype next year.
