Month: March 2020

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  The Polestar 2 is one of 2020's most anticipated cars. [credit: Jonathan Gitlin ]

Each year, there are usually one or two "it" cars—hotly anticipated new models that everyone's eager to drive. The Tesla Model 3 had that buzz. So did the Porsche Taycan. And this year, the Polestar 2 has it. Polestar used to be a badge for souped-up Volvos, but the Swedish company and its Chinese owner Geely spun the brand out as its own thing, a purveyor of electric performance cars that keep capturing our imagination. And its important new battery electric sedan has just started production at the company's factory in Luqiao, China.

The new brand's first model was the cerebral Polestar 1, a plug-in hybrid GT that will remain a rare sight on the roads. That car was more of a four-wheeled statement, a carbon-bodied coupe that said "Hi, we're here, and look what we can do with access to Volvo's car architectures." The follow-up is a much bigger deal. For one thing, it's fully electric, a format to which future Polestars will adhere. It also promises to be much more practical—the Polestar 2 is a four-door fastback, designed to tempt buyers who are bored with the conventional German and Japanese sporty sedans.

And it packs some interesting technology. The car shares the same Compact Modular Architecture as the Volvo XC40, which was designed from the ground up to have BEV variants. The Polestar 2 also uses the same 78kWh battery pack that will go into the electric version of that crossover, giving it a WLTP range at launch of 470km (292 miles). It's also one of the first cars to use Android as its infotainment OS, chosen in large part because of the robust developer ecosystem.

Enlarge / You know it's crazy when they even take the letter "E" from the sign. (credit: RabbitEMT)

The world was a strange place even before the COVID-19 pandemic, but it's gotten stranger still. One of the oddest things about this socially distanced new world is that a respiratory disease has made toilet paper worth its weight in gold. Why is everyone scrambling for toilet paper all of a sudden? Consumer behavior researcher Kit Yarrow suggests it’s a case of our social primate brains reacting to newsfeeds full of striking but sometimes disorienting visual cues.

Retail therapy on overdrive

Panic-buying during a crisis is nothing new. Midwesterners joke about everyone making Apocalypse French Toast before a blizzard, because store shelves mysteriously empty of bread, eggs, and milk. On the coast, peanut butter is the must-have item every hurricane season. In part, it’s reasonable to want to be prepared, says Yarrow. But panic-buying is partly an attempt to gain a sense of control when the world feels uncertain and dangerous.

"When we feel anxious, which I think all of us do right now—it would be sort of abnormal to not feel a little anxious—the antidote to anxiety is always control," said Yarrow. "And since we can't really control the track of this disease, we turn to what we can control, and that's why people are shopping. It's like, 'well, I feel like I'm doing something, I feel like I'm preparing. I feel like I'm taking control of the thing I can control, which is stocking up.'