How Polestar engineers EVs that can handle brutal winters

LULEA, Sweden—Staring out the window of a puddle jumper descending from Stockholm into Lulea, I spy frozen seawater for the first time in my life. Not nearly as much as I expected, though, for the middle of February at the northern end of Sweden. I've flown here to drift electric Polestars on an icy lake called Stor-Skabram, near the small outpost of Jokkmokk, fully above the Arctic Circle. Yet the balmy weather serves as a constant reminder of the climate change that inspires much of the narrative around the electric vehicle industry.

EVs on ice

An opportunity to get somebody else's cars sideways as much as possible on ice and snow is a particularly enjoyable way to spend a day, if you like driving cars. More importantly, automotive manufacturers rely on this kind of winter testing to fine-tune traction and stability-control programming, ensuring their cars can work well in the depths of the deepest winter. For EVs in particular, winter testing presents a more complex range of equations.

First of all, an EV can't ever turn the electronic nannies off entirely, because electric motors will rev to the moon with instantaneous torque the very instant their tires lose traction. So while software uses wheel speed sensors and regenerative braking, as well as accelerometers that detect yaw rates, each EV needs to then maintain progressive output responses to driver inputs that allow for confident performance and safety simultaneously.

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