Polestar Wants to Measure the Driver, Not Just the Car
Acceleration, top speed and lap times are the usual ways we quantify a performance car, and performance electric vehicles are currently in an arms race to see which can hit 60 mph in the least amount of time, as Ars Technica describes it. Measuring a car is the easy part: all you need is a stopwatch and a track.
The awkward question is what all that performance does to the person holding the wheel, which Ars Technica reports is what Polestar is trying to answer with researchers at the University of Oxford.
AI-generated discussion · Different perspectives
A stopwatch is the most honest performance metric ever devised: with a track and a timer, a car either hits the time or it doesn't, and no marketing department gets a vote. The moment the headline number becomes how a car affects its driver, the measurement moves somewhere a press kit can editorialise.
The 60 mph sprint is itself the marketing artefact — an arms race number that almost nobody experiences on a public road. Whatever the driver actually feels is what they live with every day, so it is a reasonable thing to try to put a number on.