Owner’s View: What We Think About the 2025 Polestar 3’s Interior After Living With the Polestar 2

Our long-term-test 2024 Polestar 2 wasn’t perfect, but its virtues far exceeded any issues we experienced over the course of our loan. Its attractive design, balanced handling, and impressive driving range made for a satisfying ownership experience. And though the Polestar 2’s exterior looks are unconventional, we appreciated the cabin’s straightforward layout that didn’t push into the realm of hyper-minimalist control schemes as used by automakers like Tesla and Volkswagen.

Enter the 2025 Polestar 3, which the company offers alongside the Polestar 2 as the automaker’s first all-electric SUV. While the Polestar 2 owes a lot of its quirks to the platform it shares with the Volvo XC40, the new Polestar 3 enjoys a clean slate as the first vehicle built on the same SPA2 platform that will underpin Volvo’s upcoming EX90 flagship EV.

See All 27 Photos27

How Much Minimalism Can You Take?

As a result of the platform-sharing gymnastics due to Polestar and Volvo’s affiliation with parent company Geely Holding Group, the Polestar 2 uses many of the same interior parts as Volvo’s XC40. For daily use within our long-term test fleet, this is something we appreciate. Rolling the windows up and down comes courtesy of four conventional switches. Adjusting the exterior mirrors is accomplished with two buttons for right and left plus a single toggle to control their positioning.

The stalk to the left of the steering wheel handles the turn signals and headlights; the righthand stalk takes care of the windshield wipers. A stubby shifter located between the driver and passenger selects drive, neutral, and park. A volume knob is positioned forward of that selector, and the latter has a button on top that makes it easy to pause whatever media is playing. There are many clearly labeled steering wheel buttons that control the infotainment and operate highway driving assistance features.

The vertically positioned infotainment touchscreen doesn’t look as modern as the display equipped in Tesla’s vehicles, but there aren’t so many layers of menus that it all becomes cumbersome to navigate. Polestar provides even more digital real estate with a large fully digital instrument cluster with two primary views. The Polestar 2’s minimalistic-looking cabin seems pared-down, but in reality it retains a lot of the controls familiar to anyone that’s driven a Volvo or most other cars from the last two decades.

See All 27 Photos27

The new 2025 Polestar 3 strips away many of these elements for an even more simplistic layout. The automaker copied Volkswagen’s homework, removing two window switches in favor of a selector that determines whether the pair of switches control the front or rear windows. A small light indicates which set of windows you’ve selected, but this choice leads to tedium when you try to roll all four windows down quickly. Then, there’s the matter of the steering-column stalks. The left stalk controls the turn signals and the windshield wipers; the right stalk now serves as the gear selector. As for the lighting controls, they have been banished to the touchscreen.

Polestar made an improvement by hiding the pause and play button within the ring of the volume knob on the center console, but the steering-wheel controls are no longer labeled. Polestar instead equips two buttons on the right and left spokes with capacitive sensors. If you want to see what a button does, you have to place a thumb on the button so the small digital instrument cluster can display what function it controls. Like the window switches, Polestar took minimalism a smidge too far here.

What isn’t minimalistic is the infotainment display, which now has a lot more controls scattered throughout its many pages. The main screen shows Google Maps, while a quick control panel has buttons for the lights, wiper settings, steering-wheel positioning, mirror adjustments, glovebox, and trunk. A settings tab has nine extra menus for even more personalization. At first brush, the interface is daunting and cavernous. We’ll have to spend more time with the Polestar 3 to determine exactly how puzzling the system actually is.

See All 27 Photos27

Stepping Up the Luxury

Fortunately, the rest of the Polestar 3’s cabin feels a lot more upscale than the Polestar 2’s. There are far more appealing material choices, with more soft-touch surfaces, a variety of textures, and a wider range of shades ranging from dark black to bright white in our test car. Polestar did away with the goofy cup holder setup used in the 2, which hides a second cupholder inside the armrest. Now, there are two cupholders in the open for both front-row occupants—unless the upscale sliding cover is in place. A wireless charging pad is easier to access than the one that’s hidden under the Polestar 2’s infotainment display.

As an SUV, the Polestar 3’s second row is a lot more spacious, and passengers have more headroom. Up front, there’s a better-designed frunk, and in the rear the Polestar 3 uses a new version of the excellent cargo storage system we love in the Polestar 2. The 3’s available Bowers & Wilkins sound system is a significant step up over the Harman Kardon setup offered in the Polestar 2.

An Upgrade If You Don’t Like Physical Controls

From a presentation perspective, the 2025 Polestar 3 boasts dramatically improved brand vision. The interior takes a much more dramatic departure from what we’ve seen from Polestar's Geely sibling, Volvo. We love the cabin’s look and the feel, and even the thin, ergonomically appealing steering wheel communicates the brand’s direction toward sporty luxury. Polestar has made a bold statement of futurism with its touch-reliant cabin, but we’d like to see a few more conventional controls from future products to benefit ease of use for daily operation. One thing’s for certain: The 2025 Polestar 3 has a far more distinct identity compared to the Polestar 2 we tested for a year.