Volvo tears up the rules with a subscription-only 600-hp electric GT

If I asked you to guess the manufacturer behind a new two-door, carbon-fiber bodied, 600hp plug-in hybrid electric vehicle, it’s possible Volvo would not be the first name you thought of. And technically, it doesn’t wear a Volvo badge anywhere, because this is the first product from Polestar, the automaker’s new electric performance brand. It arrives in 2019 and is the first of five new EVs from Volvo. And it looks stunning.

The past few years have been good ones for Volvo. Parent company Geely has been a generous, hands-off benefactor, and the results are showing. The Swedish automaker is now one of the most forward-thinking in the industry and a home to good engineering and design across disciplines that include interiors, infotainment, and autonomous driving. Its Scalable Product Architecture provides the building blocks for a number of very good vehicles; both the XC90 and S90 impressed us, and a brief drive in the smaller XC60 T8 plug-in hybrid has whet my appetite for a proper test later this year.

Volvo says that the Polestar 1 is only about 50 percent SPA underneath its carbon-fiber skin. The rest is unique to the car, developed by Polestar’s engineers with the aim of delivering a true driver’s car. Öhlins supplies its semi-active Continuously Controlled Electronic Suspension technology, and it sounds like each rear wheel has its own electric motor for torque-vectoring. Combined hybrid output will be 600hp (447kW) and 738lb-ft (1,000Nm), so it should be a true performance car. But at the same time don’t expect a featherweight; Volvo says it will have a battery-only range of 93 miles (150km), which means a lot of lithium-ion onboard.

Back in July, Volvo made the rest of the industry look bad, announcing five new electric vehicles as part of its plan to electrify or hybridize its range. Three of these, we were told, would be sold under the Polestar brand. Until now, the relationship between Volvo and Polestar has been a bit like that between Mercedes-Benz and AMG; Polestar has won races for Volvo and souped-up some road cars—setting a Nürburgring lap record in the process.

But now there are bigger plans for Polestar, and on Tuesday Volvo and Geely said that they are investing $756 million (RMB 5 billion) in the brand “to support the initial phase of… product, brand, and industrial development.” Among that investment is a new factory in Chengdu, China, which looks like it could rival McLaren’s NASA-meets-Disneyland facility for architectural drama.

The new Polestar factory in Chengdu, China is due to be completed in mid-2018.

Chendgu opens in 2018 and will be home to production of the entire Polestar range starting with the GT car in 2019 but following on with a mid-size battery EV and then a large SUV-sized BEV over the following two years. Both of those cars will be built in much larger volumes than the Polestar 1, and presumably at lower prices.

There are no pricing details for any of these new EVs as yet, and we don’t expect the Polestar 1 to be cheap given a carbon-fiber body and that prodigious power output. However, we do know that the ownership experience will be quite different. Volvo has been testing out a lot of new user experience ideas of late—like this concierge service pilot program—and it’s ready to put some of them into practice.

It promises to be an even less traditional experience than that offered by Tesla, and we are curious whether state dealership laws here in the US might cause any friction. All Polestars will be ordered online, and you don’t buy the car, you subscribe to it for two or three years. The subscription will be all-inclusive; Polestar will come fetch (and return) your car when it’s time to be serviced, utilizing the phone-as-a-key system that has been testing in the aforementioned concierge pilot. And if you need a different Volvo or Polestar vehicle—like that last-minute cross-country grandfather clock delivery that supposedly governs so many car-buying decisions—you can borrow one and pay for it as part of the monthly fee.