Autobayng News Team
When I first drove the Polestar 3 at the launch in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, it was September 2024. Biden was the president, Francis was the pope, and core features of the SUV were still labeled as “Coming Soon” via an over-the-air-update. Eighteen months later, only one of those statements is still true. And it’s a damning indictment of the Polestar, an SUV I love driving but struggled to live with.
Simple features—like the ability to adjust the volume of your music or skip a track using the steering wheel—are still missing. The user experience remains clunky and requires too many steps for too many functions. Eight of the 12 buttons on the steering wheel are completely useless 99% of the time. And virtually all of the other buttons have been culled, even down to the driver-seat rear window switches. Instead, there’s an infuriating toggle switch, a callous way to shave a few pennies on a test car that stickered for over $93,000.
It’s not just that these choices are frustrating in and of themselves. It’s that they’re fundamentally struggling to deliver on what should be this car’s core selling point.
Let me explain.
(Full disclosure: Polestar loaned me a 2025 Polestar 3 Dual Motor with the Performance Pack for this review. The car arrived with a full battery, and was returned with a less-full battery.) Gallery: Test Driving The 2025 Polestar 3
A True Software Defined EV
When the Polestar 3 and its mechanical twin, the Volvo EX90, arrived in 2024, they were heralded as the first true European-developed software-defined vehicles (SDVs) on sale in the U.S.
That’s no small feat. The SDV revolution is massive and massively underestimated. Ford’s CEO recently claimed it’s a bigger transition for the auto industry than the transition to EVs, and I think he’s absolutely right. Because you need to know how to make great SDVs to make great EVs. An SDV has a software stack owned and updated directly by the manufacturer, not a variety of third-party vendors.
It sounds simple, but it’s a huge value unlock. It means you can drastically reduce the amount of wiring in the car, allow systems that were previously isolated to interact together, and update everything from the drive units to the door locks over-the-air. The benefits of a true SDV are why Teslas have slicker software, more frequent updates, lower costs, and more polished user interfaces than legacy EVs. And Volvo and Polestar really were early to this game; Mercedes and BMW are just now launching their first SDVs in this market.
Traditional cars use dozens of electronic control units (ECUs) spread throughout the car, most of which use proprietary software from suppliers. SDVs, like the Rivian pictured here, use far less wiring and a handful of powerful, centralized computers to improve the software experience and cut costs.
But consumers aren’t going to buy an SDV purely because it is software-defined. Most people have no idea what that even means. The value is in creating a cheaper car, with a better software experience and a higher update cadence.
And here, Polestar and Volvo have so far failed to deliver on the promise.
How Does It Take This Long?
A key tenet of the sales pitch for SDVs is rapid upgrades. So when Polestar reps told me back in September 2024 that steering wheel controls for music were coming soon via an over-the-air update, I believed them. After all, I could feel the physical buttons clicking under my fingers. They worked for adjusting the mirrors, the few times you do that. Everything is connected.
I’m no programmer, but it seems like the solution to this problem is pretty simple. Some variation on: if VolumeUpButton == pressed {Volume+1}. Like I said, I’m a rube, but I can’t fathom how this would take 18 months. A Polestar representative said that the function will now be added via an over-the-air update after the refreshed 2027 Polestar 3 launches. To which I say: If I have to wait for a mid-cycle update to get a core feature that should have been available on launch, how exactly is this a better experience? It’s a lovely interior to look at, but a tough one to use. Photo by: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs
In fairness to Polestar, the software team has been busy with… other things. But the Polestar 3 and EX90 launched with a lot of software bugs, all of which have had to get painstakingly quashed over the last year. That hard work is paying off, to be sure. The 2025 model I drove had no major software issues. But the idea that the company launched a product so incomplete that it had to spend a year getting it to baseline reliability, all while keeping core functionality offline, feels like exactly the sort of move that has soured many consumers on tech-focused vehicles.
Frustrating Controls
Even outside of the missing functionality, there are other choices I don’t understand. First up is the window switches, which I have complained about before. Instead of a separate button for all four windows to be controlled by the driver, the Polestar has two window switches by the driver, with a toggle button that switches between front and rear window controls. So if you want to put all four windows down, you hit both switches, the toggle, and then both switches again.
Ok, these are the switches from an EX90 because I didn’t get a picture in the Polestar 3. But it’s the same setup, with tiny, barely visible lighted strips to show you what windows you are controlling.
Photo by: InsideEVs
I can’t imagine removing two switches and adding a button saved them more than a buck here. And it is an infuriating tradeoff if you—like me—love to drive with the windows down, and hate wind buffeting. I have all four windows down at least once on the majority of drives I take, as I pay for this lovely San Diego air, and I’m going to use it. So getting into the car and not knowing which windows would go down was a chore.
That’s not the only one-step process that takes two moves in the Polestar. I’m not that much of a curmudgeon when it comes to in-screen controls, and I find that the temperature control in a Rivian or Tesla is good enough in the screen that I rarely miss knobs. But that’s because you can slide your finger to adjust things quickly. In the Polestar, you have to tap the temperature, which opens a sub-menu with the + and – buttons an inch or so away. So you have to hit not one but two tiny targets while moving. Ditto for the heated and cooled seats. Photo by: Mack Hogan/InsideEVs
And as you aim your finger, your eyes must be off the road for at least a second, which is enough to trigger the world’s strictest driver-monitoring system. The Polestar 3 yelled at me constantly when I was merely trying to navigate its own convoluted systems. For instance, while it may be the best-driving SUV in its class, switching between all of your drive modes requires navigating three separate screens. Even opening the trunk isn’t easy, with no hard button for it, and another menu to navigate.
All of this would be acceptable if the result was a can’t-beat price. But the Polestar starts at $68,900 and goes up to over $90,000. At that price, you shouldn’t have to make so many compromises.
There’s Still Hope
The best part of SDVs is they allow automakers to make your car better after you buy it. But the worst part is the flip side of the same coin. Automakers now know they can launch something half-baked and finish it later, which is dangerous in an era when margins are slim and companies feel pressure to move fast. Related Stories
But it’s an old-world automotive move that may fix this: the mid-cycle update. All Polestar 3s are already eligible for a free upgrade to an Nvidia Drive AGX Orin central computer, which is a lot more powerful and should enable a slicker software experience.
More importantly, the whole car is getting a makeover for 2027, with a new 800-volt architecture that should dramatically improve charge times. And yes, Polestar says it will come from the factory with functional steering wheel buttons. That’s part of a broader push at the company to incorporate far more physical controls in future designs.
So all hope isn’t lost. Yet this entire experience is further proof that you should never buy a car on a promise of what it will be like tomorrow. You have to wait until its good enough today, and treat updates as a nice bonus. Because once you’ve given a company your money, you’re out of leverage. You’re just along for the ride. So hold strong, and wait for a product that feels complete to you.
Contact the author: Mack.Hogan@insideevs.com
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