Very Important Test: Polestar 2 vs... a bike

Another in a (very) occasional series of cars vs bikes. Last time it was McLaren, because they developed suspension for Specialized bikes. This time it’s crossovers. Yep, both cars and bikes have got this trend currently, only in cycle-land they’re known as gravel or adventure bikes. They’ve got more off-road ability than a skinny-wheeled road bike, but not the capability of a mountain bike. Naturally, they’ve taken the market by storm – the only bike you’ll ever need, many say.

Sound familiar? Course it does. Here’s a bike that’s slower and less efficient on the roads where it spends 90 per cent of the time, but because it hints that you have a life beyond, it’s the one everyone wants. The trend is newer for bikes, having exploded in the last couple of years. Cars have been on the crossover path for much longer – we’ll call it 15 years since that’s how long ago the first Nissan Qashqai arrived – but the appeal doesn’t really appear to be waning. The crossover is now often the biggest selling model in the range. Or the only model in the case of this Polestar 2.

Anyway, more in common between these two than just market positioning. See also adjustable suspension, batteries and more. Each casts an interesting shadow on the other.

This needs qualification. The Cannondale Topstone you see here is not a full electric bike. But you can have a full e-version if you want – it’s £1500 more expensive and comes with a Bosch 250 watt motor and 500wh battery – usable up to 176km, Cannondale says. Bikes work differently to cars, in that you only get e-juice provided you pedal, so it’s more of a hybrid philosophy where the electric multiplies the force you put in. You also only get assistance up to 16mph. After that, you’re on your own.

As I was saying, this isn’t that version. The only electric assistance it offers is electric gearchanging for the rear cassette, a matchbox-size battery lasting around 500 miles of riding. Don’t, like I did, take chances with that, get caught 20 miles from home with many hills in between and the bike locked in one gear.

78kWh here, so about 150 times the capacity of the Topstone e-bike. But where the bike weighs about 8kg, and its e-version no more than 15, the car is over 2,100kg. Let’s call it 200 times the weight. It’s not a strict comparo as you have to add the driver/rider to each, and of course that multiplies the bike weight hugely, but barely makes a jot of difference to the car.

But the fact remains that even for an electric car, the Polestar is still comparatively heavy for its size and interior space, and that means it’s not that efficient. A decent electric car should be capable of four miles on a single kWh of electric. In the Polestar it’s more like three.

It’s called, for obvious reasons, the Lefty fork. Looks weird, but is a Cannondale signature which has been used on their mountain bikes for years. Conventional front forks put the spring and damper in separate legs, but Cannondale combines them. It saves weight and although not suitable if you need loads of travel, for a gravel bike application it’s fine.

But it’s only got 25mm of travel. An inch. And no matter how I tweaked the pressure in it, and the pressure in the tyre, playing one off against the other, it didn’t feel to me like it was doing very much. If I locked it out with the dial on the top, I could barely tell a difference. Certainly attracted attention, though.

On the bike you have quite a lot of adjustment, all easily accessed. You can pump up the damper pressure, while twiddling another knob adjusts the rebound. Similarly, you can adjust the Polestar’s damping via a knob. It’s just not quite so easily accessed.

Now, on the Polestar 1, I saw a point for this. It was the firm’s limited edition, flagship car, a super GT that did things differently. Plus the adjusters were under the bonnet at the front, and reachable at the back with a long arm. So here’s the Polestar 2. A mainstream crossover. Have the £5,000 Performance pack and again you have Ohlins manually adjustable dampers. Makes far less sense here. And if you want to manipulate them a bit, well at the front you now have to scrabble on your back, but at the rear you have to remove the wheel and wheelarch liner in order to apply some clicks to the suspension. Pointless. Beyond pointless.

Bike again. Although it doesn’t look like it, the Topstone has suspension at both ends. Conventional at the front, but at the rear all you can see is this apparently pointless pivot. In fact the carbon frame, especially the stays that connect to the rear wheel, are designed to flex.

This allows the rear wheel to move over an arc of 30mm. And you know what? It really takes the sting out of bumpy tracks – the sudden harshness is removed.

This looks weird in some eyes – why have aero bars on a gravel bike? These flat-topped wing-profile handlebars are the kind you find on wind-cheating road bikes. Here’s why: more surface area. Riding off-road your hands get shaken around. The broad, flat bars have more surface area for the palms of your hands. Clever thinking.

And in a similar vein, here’s some more clever thinking. Touchscreens are often tricky to operate when you’re driving because it’s hard for your arm to hold itself steady in mid-air. Pressing the right button is a lottery. So Polestar flattened the top of the gearlever to form a wrist rest. It works perfectly.

This is an expensive bike. £6600. As with cars, at the top of the range the price increases are large, but the performance improvements small. The sweet spot in the Topstone range is probably somewhere around the £2,500 mark – same frame, less expensive gears, brakes, wheels and so on. Less concern about damage when you inevitably come a cropper on a rocky bridleway. 

Premium electric cars are expensive. The Polestar 2 starts at £46,900, which puts it up against direct electric rivals such as the Tesla Model 3, but also some fairly tempting conventional metal (BMW 340i xDrive Touring anyone?).

But you have to say that the car looks very good value against the bike. Where you’d pay about £730 per kg for the bike, the figure for the car is about £22. Which makes it look like a bargain when you consider that it can carry five people in weatherproof comfort over long distances. Which is why cars were invented in the first place. It’s just that we got lazy and distracted and refused to go back to the bike for the short haul, pop-to-the-shops stuff. Maybe that’s changing now.

As one bike to rule them all, a gravel bike is impressive. Not much slower or snappier than a skinnier road bike, average speeds only 1-2mph down, but the chunky tyres, run at much lower pressures don’t half take the sting out of every road surface. That was a revelation. I understood why the crossover bike has made such a large and immediate impact on the bike market.

The crossover car trend is more perplexing – and concerning. Leaving aside the powertrain used, the fact we want a taller, bluffer, heavier, more costly car when by almost every metric a conventional hatchback performs better, is questionable at best. The move to electric power makes perfect sense, but let’s not pretend it’s a global panacea. They’re more carbon consumptive to produce than a petrol car, and although zero emissions at point of use, the electricity you put in it has got to be produced somewhere. Try to make sure it’s renewable, but if you want to get much closer to genuine carbon neutrality, you need the one with pedals.

In case you were wondering, yes the bike did fit in the boot. And without even having to remove the front wheel.