Month: November 2019

• 

  This attractive GT is the Polestar 1, a new plug-in hybrid EV from a new sister company to Volvo. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

SAN FRANCISCO—Few cars in recent times have piqued my interest quite like the Polestar 1. I like 600-horsepower grand touring cars, particularly when they're dressed up in handmade carbon fiber bodies. I like plug-in hybrids even more, particularly if they come with a battery big enough to be useful. And this car is both of those. It features a supercharged, turbocharged four-cylinder gasoline engine for the front wheels and a pair of electric motors fed by a 34kWh battery at the rear. Just 1,500 will be built during the next three years, and at $155,000, they aren't cheap.

But the Polestar isn't supposed to sell in volume. It's a halo car, a mission statement, a four-wheel calling card from a startup automaker that will follow it up with an affordable (and Android-based) electric car early in 2020. Well, I say startup—spin-off might be more accurate. As the name suggests, it's the first car from Polestar, a name that used to mean souped-up Volvos and touring-car racing. Now it's a standalone brand that's going to explore the idea of electric performance cars.

If the Polestar 1 looks familiar, that's understandable. We first saw something that looked like it in 2013's Volvo Concept Coupe, and visually it shares a design language with Volvo's current -60 and -90 series cars. That's no bad thing—Volvo makes some lookers right now (particularly wagons). But not one has quite the visual drama of the Polestar 1, which takes that design language and passes it through a muscle-car filter.

Enlarge (credit: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Uber lost another $1.1 billion in the third quarter of 2019, the company announced on Monday. This wasn't a surprise: Uber lost about the same amount in the first quarter of 2019 and lost even more last quarter.

Yet the company argues that things aren't as bad as that headline figure suggests. To show why, Uber broke its earnings down by business area, distinguishing its core "rides" app from Uber Eats, Uber Freight, and other operations.

Uber says that, if you exclude certain non-operating expenses—mainly interest, depreciation, and stock-based compensation—the "rides" app actually earned a substantial $631 million profit. That's enough to cover the company's core operating expenses, the company said. But Uber's profitability was dragged down by losses in its other businesses—mainly a $316 million loss from Uber Eats.