Polestar 2. Photo: Giles Parkinson.
G’day Bryce,
I have placed a deposit on a Polestar 2 long range 2WD. I live in the Wimmera (in western Victoria) and make frequent trips to Melbourne – approximately 300km. I frequently do drive with only brief stop en route, often at night.
How can I tell what the Polestar 2 will do in real life?
Will I be able to drive home at the speed limit on a cold wet night on a single charge? The only fast chargers are in Ballarat, (not on the Ballarat bypass). Similarly, is the trip on a 40 degree day equally as feasible?
Just for interest, living totally off-grid, over 40km from town (partially unsealed and corrugated road) are the other problems that I think I have my head around.
I currently drive a small diesel car which gets us to Melbourne and back on a single tank no matter what the conditions – under 5l/100km. setting a standard hard to maintain, and making the change to EV hard to justify financially.
Our solar system has 14kW of panels and 15 kWh of Lithium-Titenate batteries. The car may sit for 3-4 days without use, then hit with a 100km return trip to Horsham.
The Polestar is due in March, and I am looking forward to it – I just have to quell this anxiety.
I appreciate and enjoy your articles in Renew Economy/TheDriven.
Thanks in advance.
Regards
Will
Hi Will. The long-range rear wheel drive Polestar 2 is a good choice. That would be my pick of the various Polestar 2 options.
For your travelling – 300km is comfortably within the range of that vehicle, although you will need to top up at your destinations. (Easier than finding a servo though. On arrival, just plug into a power outlet – or better still, a dedicated AC charger – and the charger will ‘do its thing’ as you do yours.
If all else fails and you do need a quicker turn-around via a DC charger – as I wrote recently, you will need to plan your recharge stop/s and check their availability before arriving.
Whilst planning your recharges when away from home is currently the norm, into the future that won’t be as important as charging points proliferate further at highway roadhouses. (Or even closer to home: one is opening next week at a large suburban servo very near me).
Out your way in western Victoria) there are now quite a number of DC chargers to the east, but few (yet) to your west aside from the highway to Adelaide.
Mind-you, with 11kW AC charging in the Polestar 2, you do have the option of adding around 70km charged per hour at a three phase AC charger. (For instance there is a 22kW capable one in Ararat: see www.Plugshare.com for more).
As for the reliability of range estimates, as I wrote back in 2019, it depends on your driving mix versus the test cycle parameters. The US EPA range estimate is probably closest to your use. (Which is why I include all three range estimates in my EV Fact Sheets, available here.)
In fact, about six months ago I did a 400-ish km round trip in a Polestar 2 to Fish Creek (near Wilson’s Promontory) without needing a recharge during the trip. (Which reminds me, I never did write up that test drive…).
And yes, whilst it was fine with no recharge needed for the whole trip, it was getting low-ish by the time we arrived back. A recharge overnight fixed that, without needing the time-out to detour to a fuel station on the last leg home. (One thing you quickly learn when driving an EV is how inconvenient fuel station stops really are!).
Highway speeds, by the way, don’t seem to faze the Polestar 2 much: Polestar have set the range estimator very conservatively. Heating and air conditioning do drop the range in all EVs – these will drop it by perhaps 5 to 10% if the EV has a heat-pump, more when heating if the EV has the older ‘resistive element’ style of heater. (For resistive element: think ‘electric toaster’).
Polestar 2. Source: Polestar
If you plumped for the ‘Plus Pack’ option with the Polestar 2, it adds a reverse cycle air conditioner that uses the heat-pump for heating as well as cooling. (If not – take around 15% off the range if you run the resistive element heater all the way from home to Melbourne – which is what I find in my Kona).
Living off-grid means you will also have to plan your home charging more carefully than for someone connected to the grid. As most off-grid systems have been sized to meet just over the existing household electrical demand, adding an EV to the household electricity demand will most likely call for an upgrade of the system to charge it.
At 16kW of solar though, it sounds like your system may have been sized to include the additional load of an EV already. Get an off-grid expert to do the calculations to check my surmise though – guesswork and off-grid systems are not a good marriage!
If it checks out, you would just need to add a home charger with solar output sensing. (That type of charger works to match your EV charge rate to a selected level of solar output).
Even at the lowest car charging rate (around 1.4kW), 10 to 12 hours of charging would replenish that 100km return trip to Horsham. And with that trip being to Horsham you do hit the DC charger jackpot: Horsham has four DC chargers already installed. A Polestar 2 would recharge 100km worth of range in less than 10 minutes there.
All-up, I was actually surprised that the Polestar 2 will work so well for you in what is undeniably the current edge-case for an EV.
Living off-grid in regional Victoria and doing regular long-runs would have seemed impossible for an EV even a year or two ago. With the ever expanding DC charger network and growth of the driving range and charging speeds in EVs on the market, it seems that barrier has now been breached.
Good luck in your new EV journey, Will! Looking forward to hearing how you fare and what learnings you can pass on to the readers here as you explore the capabilities of the Polestar 2 combined with an off-grid, regional home.
Keyword: Reader question: We live off grid and are getting a Polestar2. How should we manage charging?