Credit: Polar Star
Polestar and the University of Oxford fitted 12 drivers with eye trackers and heart rate monitors and sent them around a Swedish race track in two versions of the Polestar 4. The goal was to put numbers on something no spec sheet reflects: how the performance feels to the person driving.
The 544-hp Polestar 4 Dual engine with Performance Package delivered 32 percent greater top acceleration than the 268-hp rear-engine version in even laps, and required 15 percent less steering effort to achieve it. Drivers also rated the experience much higher.
How Oxford and Polestar tried to measure the “feel” of performance
The pilot study comes from researchers at the SDG Impact Lab at the University of Oxford, in collaboration with Polestar. It took place on Gotland Ring, a track built inside a former limestone quarry on the Swedish island of Gotland.
Each participant drove both cars in calm and dynamic conditions:
- Polestar 4 rear engine: 200 kilowatts (268 horsepower)
- Polestar 4 Dual Motor with Performance Package: 400 kilowatts (544 horsepower)
The researchers recorded vehicle telemetry along with heart rate data, eye tracking and psychological assessments, and then interviewed the drivers. The idea is to align what the car was doing at any given moment with what was happening to the human inside it.
Photos from the test also show drivers wearing electrode caps, although brain activity is not among the measures for which Polestar published results.
Several of those measures reacted when driving became more intense. In dynamic driving, participants blinked less, their pupils became larger, and they kept their gaze fixed longer on a given point. Researchers interpret this as deeper attention. They could also link moments in telemetry to changes in drivers’ physiological arousal.
32% more acceleration, 15% less steering effort
The comparison between cars is the most specific part of the study. On evenly matched fast laps, where both versions were driven at virtually the same pace, the Performance Package car achieved 32% greater top acceleration and required 15% less steering effort. It also required higher cornering loads and recorded more hard acceleration events.
That leadership figure is the one I would focus on. Double the power would be expected to mean more work for the driver in the same lap time. On the other hand, the dual-engine car asked less of them.
The pilots’ own scores moved in the same direction. On the study’s Performance/Dynamics scale, the Performance version scored 89.2 out of 100, compared to 67.7 for the rear engine. Overall experiential quality was 93.0 vs. 77.9, with most drivers rating the Performance version higher in both.
“A controlled roller coaster”
The interviews are where he becomes more human. The drivers did not describe the performance as pure adrenaline. They spoke of a mixture of physical excitement, confidence in the car, a feeling of control and intense concentration. Several of them, independently, landed on the same image: a “controlled roller coaster.”
One participant said that the car “makes you feel like a better driver than you are.” The researchers found that drivers linked that combination of excitement, confidence and control most consistently to the Performance version.
Max Klapow, a doctoral researcher at the Oxford SDG Impact Lab, put it this way:
“Performance isn’t just about going faster. It’s about giving the driver a sense of confidence and control through predictable vehicle responses.”
Christian Samson, Polestar’s head of product attributes, said the company wanted to understand “something that can’t be captured solely with a spec sheet.”
Now, the warnings. The researchers themselves call this a feasibility pilot and say a larger study is needed to establish whether the findings are reliable and valid. There are 12 people, Polestar’s own cars, and Polestar attaches a documentary series to it.
There is also some uncomfortable context for American readers. As we reported in June, Polestar was banned from selling new cars in the US starting with the 2027 model year under the connected vehicle rule, even though the Polestar 4 is made in South Korea. The brand now focuses its plans on Europe, with the Formula 2030 concept previewing its next models.
Electrek’s opinion
This is a topic that has fascinated me for years. I’ve driven many EVs and the spec sheet tells me very little about whether I’ll enjoy one. Two cars with the same 0-60 mph time can feel completely different. One makes you smile. The other pins you to the seat and leaves you strangely numb.
The problem is that it’s really hard to discuss. What seems like confidence to one driver, seems like an overly assisted steering rack to another. It’s different for everyone, and there’s basically no quantitative data on it, so the conversation ends up with reviewers, including me, exchanging adjectives.
Kudos to Polestar and Oxford for trying. Comparing blink rate, pupil size, and heart rate to steering effort and telemetry is a real attempt to connect engineering with experience, and I haven’t seen any automaker publish anything like it.
And now it is more important than ever. Electric vehicles turned acceleration into a commodity. Family crossovers accelerate from 0 to 60 mph in less than 5 seconds. If everyone has the numbers straight, the difference comes down to how the car makes you feel, and right now most automakers are fine-tuning that by instinct.
I wouldn’t take it to the bank 89.2 versus 67.7. Twelve drivers is not a large sample, and no one needed a study to know that a 544 HP car is, on average, more fun than one with 268 HP. But the outcome of the steering and that “better driver than you” phrase gets to what I think separates high-performance cars from fast ones: they make you feel in control while going faster.
What I would love to see next is the larger version with cars from different brands. Would a Model 3 Performance, Ioniq 5 N, and Polestar 4 produce significantly different responses to the same lap times? That’s the study I want to read.
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