Polestar 3 - long-term review

I’ve had three wall chargers in the past 10 years or so, all of which did what they said on the tin. The tin being an unassuming looking plastic shroud. Plugging your car in has never been an especially exciting activity – until something goes wrong, that is.

After a bit of looking around, I’ve upgraded to an Ohme. An Irish start-up now headquartered in London, this is the UK’s largest EV charging company and the fastest growing in Europe (so they claim, anyway). It’s also the official home charging provider for Hyundai, Mercedes, Volvo and the VW group, amongst others. Some of the UK’s biggest house builders are on-board, too, given that it’s now a legal requirement to fit smart chargers on new residential developments.

The key thing here is the smart bit. Lord knows I wasn’t keen on having yet another app clogging up my phone, but this one’s actually useful. It uses API – an application programming interface, for those who don’t speak nerd – to deliver full software integration. For example, it takes advantage of the dynamic pricing tariffs that various energy suppliers are now providing. So if you’re with, say, Intelligent Octopus Go, it’ll give you six hours off-peak at 7p per kWh, but also knows when there’s a surplus of renewable energy on the grid if you’ve asked to charge to 90 per cent, and charge accordingly.

By integrating the charging point with your energy tariff, you can also set a maximum price cap to avoid charging at peak hours (unless you’re disorganised like me, in which case you can switch that function off). Ohme can also dial its chargers up and down in peak periods.

The charging point itself isn’t a thing of Apple-style beauty, but it’s robust enough and features an interactive colour LED display. It looks like a touchscreen but isn’t; instead you use three buttons beneath the screen. But you’ll probably do most of it from the comfort of your sofa, via the app. Yes, watch in real time as electrons make their way down the cable and into your car. Well, it beats Love Island. My most recent charging session, to give you an example, lasted 8h 50 minutes, used 65.5 kWh of energy, took the Polestar’s range from 100 miles to 280, and cost £11.05.

As ever with EVs, saving money and maximising efficiency becomes an end in itself. Easy to forget that there’s a highly sophisticated car attached to all my money supermarketing. Even with more than 500bhp to play with and a clever diff there to promote the car’s handling smarts, the Polestar 3 still makes more sense to me as a Scandi spa retreat on wheels, minus the swimming pool. This is a supremely relaxing car to interact with, up to and including its spectacular audio system. More on that soon.