It’s been five years since Polestar first introduced the Precept, a concept car that the electric automaker described as “a manifesto of things to come; a declaration.” Well, come they have, because today Polestar finally revealed the production car that’s based on this manifesto: the Polestar 5.
And wow, these specs: up to 460 miles of range, 800-volt architecture for ultra-fast charging, 884 horsepower, 0–60mph in an oomph-inducing 3.1 seconds for the Performance trim. It certainly makes those five years feel like worth the wait.
In final form, the Polestar 5 is an absolutely stunning fastback sedan with dramatic proportions that are sized similarly to the Porsche Panamera. The 5 will be built on a bespoke supercar-like bonded aluminum platform that’s was developed at Polestar’s own facility in England. And like the Polestar 4, it lacks a rear window, relying instead on a high-definition rearview camera.
There’s a lot more, so let’s dig into it.
Image: Polestar
At launch, there will be two versions of the Polestar 5: a Dual Motor trim with 748hp (550kW), 599lb-ft of torque (812 Newton-meters), and a 0–60mph time of 3.8 seconds; and a Performance package with 884hp (650kW), 749lb-ft (1,015Nm) of torque, and 0–60mph acceleration in 3.1 seconds. Both versions are speed-limited to a maximum of 155mph — seemingly in the spirit of former parent company Volvo’s safety maxim of limiting vehicle max speed to 112mph.
The 800-volt architecture is new to Polestar, and should enable 350kW charging when plugged into a suitable charger. That means 10–80 percent charging in “as little” as 22 minutes, the company says. Owners can expect a WLTP estimated range of 670km (416 miles) for the Dual Motor trim and 565km (351 miles) for the Performance one.
The Polestar 5’s battery contains 112kWh of energy, 106kWh of which is usable. The SK One-supplied NMC (nickel cobalt manganese) pack consists of eight modules with 192 cells. And its design forms part of the 5’s steel structure, which Polestar says brings safety benefits.

Image: Polestar
The Polestar 5 is built on the company’s Polestar Performance Architecture (PPA), which uses a bespoke, hot-cured aluminum structure for improved weight and rigidity. That frame consists of 13 percent recycled aluminum and 83 percent aluminum from smelters (no word on the remaining 4 percent), which helps lower the 5’s carbon footprint when compared to standard sourcing.
(Keep in mind that Polestar has positioned itself as one of the few automotive startups that still gives a shit about climate change. The company’s CEO recently used his keynote at the IAA Mobility conference in Munich, where the Polestar 5 will make its debut, to urge EU leaders to stick to their strict zero-emission goals.)
The Performance variant is slated to have a sport-tuned suspension with semi-active dampers. There are also bespoke Michelin tires, designed specifically for the Polestar 5, ranging from 20 to 22 inches depending on the trim level.
Inside, you’ll find a 14.5-inch portrait display alongside a 9-inch instrument cluster behind the steering wheel. To cut down on distractions, there will be a 9.5-inch heads-up display projected on the windshield. And a driver-monitoring camera makes sure the driver keeps their eyes on the road while the driver assist system is engaged.
The Performance variant is slated to have a sport-tuned suspension with semi-active dampers.
The front fascia features Polestar’s SmartZone, which consists of many of the vehicles’ sensors, like radar and the front parking camera. In total, the Polestar 5 has 11 vision cameras, one driver monitoring camera, one mid-range radar, and 12 ultrasonic sensors. (Unlike the Polestar 3 and 4, the 5 won’t feature a lidar sensor.) The vehicle also uses interior radars to detect the number, position, and type of occupants to “deploy the correct safety measures in the event of an accident.”
There’s a lot of high-end brand names scattered throughout this announcement: Brembo for braking, Bowers & Wilkins for a premium audio system, and Bridge of Weir nappa leather as an optional interior. The driver-assist system is powered by Mobileye, while the infotainment system runs on Google’s embedded Android software.
While designed as a four-seater, the rear arm rest can be lifted to accommodate a fifth passenger. Polestar cut out a space in the battery, known as the foot garage, behind the front seats to give occupants an extra foot of space for a more natural seating position.
Polestar didn’t reveal a launch date or starting price for the 5, only to say they are coming soon. Suffice it to say it won’t be cheap. The Performance version of the grand tourer is expected to start somewhere north of $100,000 in North America.
The company has had a strong sales year so far, thanks to some deep discounts, including one geared toward converting former Tesla owners. The company makes the Polestar 2 electric fastback, the Polestar 3 electric SUV, and the Polestar 4 electric SUV coupe.
Tariffs are sure to take a toll on the Geely-owned, Swedish-designed company’s future. Polestar manufactures in the US and China, and plans to make the Polestar 4 in South Korea in the second half of 2025. It hasn’t said where the 5 will be built, so that will be one to watch.
But despite these challenges, Polestar is charging ahead. First shown last spring as the O2 concept, the Polestar 6 will be the brand’s next flagship model, taking the form of a two-door sports car with a convertible roof. And when the 6 goes on sale (presumably in 2026), it will use the same architecture and powertrains as the Polestar 5.
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#Polestar #884hp #fastback #sedan #Porsche #nervous
![Scientists Found a Continent-Sized Geological Structure Hiding Beneath Antarctica
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost unfathomably huge. Covering about 75% of the entire frigid continent (nearly everything on its side of the Transantarctic Mountains), the sheet covers about 3.9 million square miles (10.2 million square kilometers) and extends down 1.4 miles (2.2 km), on average, before coming into contact with Earth’s surface. At its deepest, the ice plunges down over 3 miles (4.9 km). For decades, scientists assumed that this literally continent-sized block of ice rested on an expansive and stable chunk of Earth’s crust known as a craton. A team of researchers has now complicated that picture—mapping a vast, interconnected geological structure that fans out from a troubling “tectonic deformation.” Beneath this ice sheet, thinner and more geologically recent slices of crusty lithosphere fan out into hidden valleys called “pull-apart basins.” These basins—30 elongated wedge-shaped valleys in total—constitute an entirely new, continental-scale geological region underneath Antarctica, in fact, one which the researchers have named the East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province (EAFBP). But it’s how they likely formed that has now caught researchers’ attention.
To put it bluntly, it turns out that about 90% of the planet’s fresh water ice may not be on solid ground. Geologist John Goodge called the team’s findings “provocative” in an independent commentary on the new study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“East Antarctica is typically considered from seismic tomography and geodetics to be ancient and generally stable,” according to Goodge, who studies continental tectonics with the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute. “[But] something else is going on at depth.” Continental divides Goodge speculates that this seemingly “coherent pull-apart system,” as presented in the new study, might help explain a variety of mysterious heat and water flows beneath this ice sheet’s surface, like that enormous subglacial lake identified in 2016 or some of the hundreds more like it.
The study’s authors, led by geophysicist Egidio Armadillo at the University of Genoa in Italy, agreed: “Because these basins underlie about half of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, they are likely to heavily influence both ice-flow and landscape evolution,” the researchers wrote in their study, also published Thursday in Nature Geoscience. Armadillo’s team, coordinating across Europe and the U.K., developed their new understanding of Antarctica’s hidden bedrock via an exhaustive set of sensory data. Gravitational and magnetic anomalies were mapped via low-altitude airborne surveys. Ground surface features were mapped with seismic tools, using sound waves that vibrate through the ice and ping back information about subglacial landscapes in 3D. The grey, magenta, and cyan lines represent the apparent new fault lines discovered. Credit: Nature Geoscience All of this data—the fruits of “multi-national efforts to image within and below the ice sheet,” as Goodge put it—had already revealed that regions of the continent were “undergoing more rapid movement and ice-mass loss than previously recognized.” Armadillo’s team merely helped to explain why.
The mechanism Armadillo and his colleagues proposed for the formation of these fan-shaped basins is called “distributed rotational extension.” It involves points called Euler poles around which tectonic plates pivot or rotate rather than smash into each other or pull apart. The result is a bit like decks of cards being spread out on a table, thinning out the stack of Earth’s crust as it moves. An icy situation Goodge took pains to spell out the basins’ implications for melting Antarctic ice due to climate change and the risk of rising global sea levels.
The mere existence of these basins, he wrote, “could introduce widespread, systemic instability to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet” via thinner layers of Earth’s crust and more heat flow from below. On top of that, a series of fault-line “troughs” documented between the basins appear “tailor-made to promote outward flow of ice streams from the interior” into the world’s oceans, he said. That said, the team’s findings are unlikely to end this debate. As Goodge noted, Antarctica is “the last continental frontier of scientific exploration.” It’s still a very mysterious place, one that’s challenging to study given its inhospitable temperatures and extreme geography. Its “cryptic subglacial geology” might stay that way for a while. #Scientists #ContinentSized #Geological #Structure #Hiding #Beneath #AntarcticaAntarctica,Geology,mapping,Plate tectonics Scientists Found a Continent-Sized Geological Structure Hiding Beneath Antarctica
The East Antarctic Ice Sheet is almost unfathomably huge. Covering about 75% of the entire frigid continent (nearly everything on its side of the Transantarctic Mountains), the sheet covers about 3.9 million square miles (10.2 million square kilometers) and extends down 1.4 miles (2.2 km), on average, before coming into contact with Earth’s surface. At its deepest, the ice plunges down over 3 miles (4.9 km). For decades, scientists assumed that this literally continent-sized block of ice rested on an expansive and stable chunk of Earth’s crust known as a craton. A team of researchers has now complicated that picture—mapping a vast, interconnected geological structure that fans out from a troubling “tectonic deformation.” Beneath this ice sheet, thinner and more geologically recent slices of crusty lithosphere fan out into hidden valleys called “pull-apart basins.” These basins—30 elongated wedge-shaped valleys in total—constitute an entirely new, continental-scale geological region underneath Antarctica, in fact, one which the researchers have named the East Antarctic Fan-Shaped Basin Province (EAFBP). But it’s how they likely formed that has now caught researchers’ attention.
To put it bluntly, it turns out that about 90% of the planet’s fresh water ice may not be on solid ground. Geologist John Goodge called the team’s findings “provocative” in an independent commentary on the new study, published Thursday in the journal Nature Geoscience.
“East Antarctica is typically considered from seismic tomography and geodetics to be ancient and generally stable,” according to Goodge, who studies continental tectonics with the nonprofit Planetary Science Institute. “[But] something else is going on at depth.” Continental divides Goodge speculates that this seemingly “coherent pull-apart system,” as presented in the new study, might help explain a variety of mysterious heat and water flows beneath this ice sheet’s surface, like that enormous subglacial lake identified in 2016 or some of the hundreds more like it.
The study’s authors, led by geophysicist Egidio Armadillo at the University of Genoa in Italy, agreed: “Because these basins underlie about half of the East Antarctic Ice Sheet, they are likely to heavily influence both ice-flow and landscape evolution,” the researchers wrote in their study, also published Thursday in Nature Geoscience. Armadillo’s team, coordinating across Europe and the U.K., developed their new understanding of Antarctica’s hidden bedrock via an exhaustive set of sensory data. Gravitational and magnetic anomalies were mapped via low-altitude airborne surveys. Ground surface features were mapped with seismic tools, using sound waves that vibrate through the ice and ping back information about subglacial landscapes in 3D. The grey, magenta, and cyan lines represent the apparent new fault lines discovered. Credit: Nature Geoscience All of this data—the fruits of “multi-national efforts to image within and below the ice sheet,” as Goodge put it—had already revealed that regions of the continent were “undergoing more rapid movement and ice-mass loss than previously recognized.” Armadillo’s team merely helped to explain why.
The mechanism Armadillo and his colleagues proposed for the formation of these fan-shaped basins is called “distributed rotational extension.” It involves points called Euler poles around which tectonic plates pivot or rotate rather than smash into each other or pull apart. The result is a bit like decks of cards being spread out on a table, thinning out the stack of Earth’s crust as it moves. An icy situation Goodge took pains to spell out the basins’ implications for melting Antarctic ice due to climate change and the risk of rising global sea levels.
The mere existence of these basins, he wrote, “could introduce widespread, systemic instability to the East Antarctic Ice Sheet” via thinner layers of Earth’s crust and more heat flow from below. On top of that, a series of fault-line “troughs” documented between the basins appear “tailor-made to promote outward flow of ice streams from the interior” into the world’s oceans, he said. That said, the team’s findings are unlikely to end this debate. As Goodge noted, Antarctica is “the last continental frontier of scientific exploration.” It’s still a very mysterious place, one that’s challenging to study given its inhospitable temperatures and extreme geography. Its “cryptic subglacial geology” might stay that way for a while. #Scientists #ContinentSized #Geological #Structure #Hiding #Beneath #AntarcticaAntarctica,Geology,mapping,Plate tectonics](https://gizmodo.com/app/uploads/2026/06/East-Antarctic-Fan-shaped-Basin-Province.jpeg)
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