► Polestar vs Porsche vs BMW
► Family EVs don’t have to be boring
► But which one is best?
The tempting family EV has arrived. So, electric Porsche Macan, Polestar’s funky 4 or BMW’s i5 Touring?
Polestar 4: pre-flight briefing
What’s the line-up?
There are only two models in the Polestar 4 line-up: the standard £59,990 car with a single 268bhp motor driving the rear wheels; and the dual-motor flagship with a combined 536bhp from the motors, one over each axle, and active damping. Both feature the same 94kWh battery.
Data
Price £66,990 (£75,040 as tested)
Powertrain 94kWh battery, twin e-motors, all-wheel drive
Performance 536bhp, 506Ib ft, 3.7sec 0-62mph, 124mph
Weight 2255kg
Efficiency 3.9 miles per kWh (official), 3.2 miles per kWh (tested), 367-mile range (official), 301-mile range (tested)
Boot capacity 526 litres plus 15-litre frunk
Read our Polestar 4 review
Porsche Macan: pre-flight briefing
What’s the line-up?
The range kicks off with the basic £68,500 Macan, powered by a 355bhp electric motor. Three all-wheel-drive twin-motor models follow: the 382bhp Macan 4 priced at £71,200 (tested here), the 509bhp Macan 4S and the face-rearranging Turbo (630bhp, £96,900).
Data
Price £71,200 (£78,978 as tested)
Powertrain 95kWh battery, twin e-motors, all-wheel drive
Performance 382bhp, 479lb ft, 5.2sec 0-62mph, 137mph Weight 2330kg
Efficiency 3.4 miles per kWh (official), 3.2 miles per kWh (tested), 373-mile range (official), 322-mile range (tested)
Boot capacity 540 litres plus 80-litre frunk
Read our Porsche Macan review
BMW i5 Touring: pre-flight briefing
What’s the line-up?
Ownership starts with the £69,945 Sport Edition. Stepping up to the spanglier M Sport will take that up to £76,355. The M Sport Pro, like ours, adds another £3000 to the bill. All are rear-wheel drive and share the same 81.2kWh battery; 593bhp M60 xDrive is an extortionate £99,995.
Data
Price £79,355 (£94,995 as tested)
Powertrain 81.2kWh battery, single e-motor, rear-wheel drive
Performance 335bhp, 295Ib ft, 6.1sec 0-62mph, 120mph Weight 2355kg
Efficiency 3.3 miles per kWh (official), 2.9 miles per kWh (tested), 311-mile range (official), 235-mile range (tested)
Boot capacity 570 litres
Read our BMW i5 Touring review
Polestar 4 vs Porsche Macan vs BMW i5: the test
he weather is absolutely atrocious out there. Heavy winds and sleety horizontal rain are sweeping in from the Channel, turning the numbingly cold winter evening into a wild living thing. Like a hermetically sealed bank vault the i5 feels utterly impervious to these conditions as it cuts smoothly and quietly along the coastal roads towards its rendezvous with Polestar’s new 4 coupe-SUV and the latest Macan from Porsche. All three are battery electric, and all three are hugely desirable family cars.
As an EV-only marque post-Volvo, Polestar doesn’t have to contend with the challenging transition from fossil fuel. With the might of Geely’s backing, it’s wrapping widely-shared platform architectures in adventurously bold genre-blurring designs laden with plenty of eye-catching technology.
Porsche has bet the house on its second-generation Macan. It may be instantly recognisable as Porsche’s small SUV, but beneath that vaguely familiar silhouette sits electric-only architecture. Yup, in some countries the only new Macan you can now buy is an electric one, a huge risk for Zuffenhausen’s best-seller.
BMW is not being anywhere near as rash. The 5-series/i5 can accommodate combustion, PHEV and EV powertrains, with all the manufacturing benefits and packaging compromises such a one-platform-fits-all approach brings. For all this ingenuity, the handsome G61 i5 still looks very much the traditional – some might even say outmoded – estate car.
Tickets to drive into our electrified future are wallet-wiltingly expensive. Key options on our range-topping Long Range Dual Motor 4 include £1400 for metallic Snow paint, a £1300 Pilot pack consisting of driver-assistance features, and a £4000 Performance pack that adds uprated Brembo brakes, 22-inch alloys with Pirelli P-Zero tyres, adaptive dampers, and gold finish for the brake calipers, tyre valve caps and seatbelts. That’s £75,040 – big money, but the 4 is both Polestar’s fastest model and the one with the smallest carbon footprint. Its 94kWh (net) battery serves front and rear e-motors that jointly generate 536bhp and 506Ib ft for 0-62mph in 3.7sec and a 124mph top speed. Maximum charging speed is a so-so 200kW, for a half-hour recharge from 10 to 80 per cent.
The twin-motor Porsche sits one step above the entry-level single-motor Macan and weighs in at £71,200. Our £78,978 car is fitted with options including an extended leather pack (£2805), comfort front seats (£899) and 360º parking assistance (£833). The motors dish up 382bhp and 479lb ft, fed by a 95kWh battery. Compared to the Polestar, it’s a bit of an on-paper slouch, slipping silently to 62mph in 5.2 seconds and posting a 137mph top speed. It features the same 800-volt charging tech as the Taycan, and a 270kW maximum charging speed that should result in a 10 to 80 per cent charge in just 21 minutes.
The BMW swaggers into the ring and instantly makes its rivals look like Poundland bargains. This M Sport Pro Touring – currently in service on our long-term test fleet – wears a £79,355 price tag, hiked up to £94,995 by a further options. I know, right? That’s a brand new Kia Picanto’s worth of extra gear. Highlights include £2000 21-inch alloys, a £1600 panoramic glass roof, £3300 for the Technology Plus pack and £4600 for the Comfort Plus pack. So it’s the dearest – but with an 81.2kWh battery driving a single rear-mounted motor that musters 335bhp and 295Ib ft for a 6.1sec run to 62mph and a 120mph top end, it also has the smallest battery and on paper is the slowest car here. With a 205kW maximum you’ll need to nurse a motorway coffee for half an hour to recharge from 10 to 80 per cent.
I climb into the intriguingly styled Polestar, which, despite the dirty grey weather, looks strikingly fresh and sharp. Its creases, geometric details and unusual proportions, penned by the now departed (to BMW) Max Missoni, hold your visual interest far longer than the Germans. It’s exactly what you’d want a 21st Century electric car to look like. From the piercing headlamp slashes that flank its shovel-like nose, along its chiselled flanks to its stumpy rear end, complete with full-width brake light, the 4 catches the eye. But it uses a platform generally employed by the Geely group’s less sophisticated EVs, whereas the Polestar 3 has a more advanced set of underpinnings, and if you drive the 3 and 4 back to back you can tell.
There are a dozen cameras housed on the outside, but the most noteworthy are the rear-facing units that feed the rear-view ‘mirror’. Why? Well, the 4 doesn’t have a glazed rear screen. In a bid to balance aero efficiency, a visually pleasing roofline and headroom, Polestar’s designers pushed back the rear header rail so it sits behind the passengers, rather than above them. This, they say, created an all but useless narrow letterbox-shape screen, prompting Missoni to opt for a solid panel, with rear vision provided by cameras. Interesting.
Swing open the frameless doors and you’re greeted by a stunning cabin that’s light, airy and welcoming. The clean minimalist architecture, the sophisticated mix of wonderfully tactile fabrics, plastics and leathers, the numerous surprise-and-delight details, the balance between understatement and luxury – it’s really lovely in here and easily the lushest cabin I’ve sat in for a long time. Sumptuously comfortable too, with superb seats and acres of room for all, in all directions. The rear 60:40 split seats electrically recline, and rear passengers can operate their own climate control to create decadent business-class levels of supine comfort. Equipment levels are also embarrassingly high – you’ll want for nothing. Decent room in the boot, too, with 526 litres plus a handy 15-litre frunk for cables.
The 4 runs Google’s OS via a 15.4-inch landscape tablet that’s very responsive, with shallower menus augmented by large, crisply rendered icons and alpha-numerics. If you absolutely insist on operating everything by screen, this is a small step in the right direction, although having to use the screen to open the glovebox resulted in much swearing. And why not make better use of the tactile rotary controller on the centre console, which only adjusts the volume and allows you to play and pause your music?
High hopes, then. But almost immediately I find the 4’s low-speed ride quality just too brittle in even its softest setting. Too many imperfections are transmitted into the cabin instead of being deftly sponged away.
These shivers, thumps and clunks turn the roads between Eastbourne, Lewes and Tunbridge Wells into uncomfortably jolting treks. If you invest in the expensive business of adaptive dampers surely you should have the choice of a ‘wafty chauffeur’ mode with an absorbingly plump and pillowy ride quality. It’s the mode I keep wishing the 4 had, rather than too many rock-hard, zero-bodyroll options.
The ride improves as speeds increase, and with 536bhp and 506 Ib ft to uncork the Polestar is rather good at getting a wiggle on. But this uncovers other shortcomings. It’s quite noisy – blame those frameless doors. The 4’s steering doesn’t have the accuracy and crispness you’d hope for in a car with such points-gathering performance. Even with its 50:50 weight distribution, body control lacks the level of sophistication you’d want when taking the fun way home.
You both sense and feel the suspension is working hard, often too hard, when stringing together a series of curves on an undulating road. There’s also no torque vectoring on the axle to sharpen up cornering angles. All of which means you invariably back off, left with the hard-done-by feeling that some of that expensive firepower will always be left untapped.
While the accelerator pedal has a well-calibrated and progressive response, whether you’re nosing around a multi-storey car park or reeling in the horizon, the brake pedal lacks the same finesse. But the uprated brakes are certainly up to repeatedly hauling down the Polestar from big speeds without breaking a sweat.
I give up after numerous attempts to acclimatise myself to the camera-fed rear-view mirror. I wear driving glasses and it took what felt like ages for my eyes to focus on the screen, and then too long to refocus on the road in front of me. So no subconscious eye-flick to the left and back to the road every few seconds to establish what is behind me. And the wind-blown rain kept obscuring the camera lenses, making the system all but useless, particularly at night. Today’s weather is extreme, yes, but even so. And all this – plus a boot that no dog owner would find useful – to create a few extra inches of rear headroom. Meh.
Next, the Porsche – quite possibly the diametric opposite of the Polestar. After the Swede’s arresting combination of creases and curves, the Macan is disappointingly dumpy and dull, with a generic SUV silhouette – it looks like it weighs every one of its 2330kg. The Macan is Porsche’s biggest seller. It’s shifted some 850,000 units since its launch a decade ago – and given the current febrile nature of the car market, tiptoeing gingerly down anything other than a very cautious evolutionary design path could easily lead to an existential crisis. But to my eyes this really looks like something phoned in on a Friday afternoon. When you drop the thick end of £80,000 on a Porsche you deserve something that makes you feel special. This does not, to look at.
Good job that what lies beneath is far more impressive. The Macan sits on the Volkswagen Group’s shiny new Premium Platform Electric (PPE) architecture, which Porsche co-developed with Audi for the Q6 e-Tron. Its 95kW nickel-manganese-cobalt battery features 800-volt charging capability, and the prismatic cells can be split into two banks on a 400-volt charger for quicker and more efficient charging. Porsche quotes an optimistic 373-mile range, but you can realistically expect a still impressive 320 miles on a single charge.
After the Polestar’s light and airy cabin and elevated driving position, the Macan feels like falling into a deep and black hole – but in a good way. It may be bereft of surprise-and-delight details but the fundamentals of the Macan’s cabin are spot-on. You sit low in very supportive seats and grip a lovely thin-rimmed steering wheel, complete with knurled dial for the drive modes. The compact central screen is embedded within the dash, and can be so dinky because it doesn’t have to handle absolutely everything under the sun, as the cabin is shot-gunned with physical buttons – for the climate control, mirrors, sound system and seat adjustment. How very refreshing.
Rear passengers are short-changed, though. Accommodation is merely modest compared to the Polestar, there’s not much light to break up the darkness, and no dedicated niceties to make trips that fraction more endurable. It’s Ryanair to the Singapore first class the Polestar’s passengers enjoy. That said, the Macan’s cabin is intelligently configured, offering plenty of oddment storage space, supplementing the generous luggage room in the boot – an Ikea-friendly 540 litres of it, plus a generous 80-litre frunk – and the rear seats split 40:20:40.
The Macan’s styling may disappoint, but the way is flows down the road most certainly does not. It drives exactly the way you’d want and expect a Porsche to, with steering, suspension, brakes and chassis all working harmoniously together to deliver a driving experience that’s rewarding, comfortable and engaging in equal measure. Over the same roads that quickly exposed the Polestar’s shortcomings, the Macan is in its absolute element, displaying real sophistication in the way it combines excellent body control with a ride that sets the ideal balance between firmness and compliance.
On paper it may be 154bhp down against the powerhouse Polestar, but it’s only 27lb ft short of the 4’s 506Ib ft output. So in a straight line the Polestar would leave the Porsche for dead. But over a sodden and slippery Sussex A-road, that order would be quickly reversed, with the Porsche’s superior athleticism and dynamic control allowing you to use more of its grunt more of the time.
As a pacey and dynamic point-to-pointer, the Macan is quite the thing. But don’t think it can beat physics. It still feels like a big and heavy car, because at 4784mm in length and with a kerbweight of 2330kg, it is a big and heavy car. Porsche’s engineers are just more gifted at managing and controlling all that moving mass than most. And we love them for that.
You will probably be having enough fun to ignore the high levels of wind and road noise seeping through the frameless door windows and into the cabin, or to not worry about how the cheap-feeling climate-control housing flexes every time you touch it, or that a Polestar 4 will turn more far heads than your more expensive Porsche ever will.
I initially thought that the sheer normality of the i5, combined with its lottery-winner price tag, relatively modest performance, modest range and lack of outright sporting ambition would quickly push it out contention. But let’s see.
The decision to create a modular platform capable of accommodating all manner of both combustion and electric powertrains is entirely understandable, given the billions required to create just one matrix, let alone dedicated architecture for different power sources. But it brings with it compromises as well as benefits, as heaving open the i5’s big bonnet illustrates. Around the inverter, cooling systems and power electronics there’s echoing empty space between bulkhead and front axle that’s set aside for housing four- and six-cylinder petrol, diesel and hybrid powerplants.
Which explains that runway-long bonnet and a cabin that, though big enough for five, never feels quite as spacious as the i5’s length suggest. They may not have the sprawling space the Polestar’s passengers enjoy, but they’ll be far more comfortable and pampered than the Porsche’s. The driver’s seat can be cranked right down until you feel just inches off the road, while that chunky three-spoke wheel has generous reach and rake adjustment, and the pedals are ideally positioned for two-feet driving. Rear passengers get their own climate controls, heated seats and integrated mounts for tablets.
The 570-litre boot is capable of swallowing everything from bicycles to bookcases. No frunk, though, even with all that dead space in the nose. And whoever made the inexplicable decision to ditch the opening rear glass hatch should spend the rest of their life walking barefoot on Lego bricks for their sins.
I’m still not sold on the i5’s odd art deco-ish cabin design. The juxtaposition of a very traditional and familiar estate silhouette with an overwrought cabin style that incoherently mixes buttons and physical switches with haptic, touch and hand-gesture controls takes some getting used to. Bevelled glass iDrive controller, slabs of chamfered back-lit acetate, hexagonal laser-cut speaker covers… I’m not there yet. Nor am I fan of the multitude of apps for managing safety, driver assistance, infotainment and vehicle settings that are scattered across the central screen – a lesson in confused ergonomics.
But these mostly become trivial issues once you’re on the move. Driving the BMW over the same roads as the 4 and Macan is like being wrapped in a 15-tog duvet and wearing earplugs. The cabin is eerily quiet, admitting only the lightest of wind rustle and road rumble, and the passive suspension does a superb job of both soaking up all manner of intrusions and dealing with undulations, cambers and changes of surface. The calibration of the brake and accelerator pedals and the precision of the steering is perfectly judged. You can manoeuvre this big car smoothly and with accuracy in tight car parks with the same confidence as you can brake late into fast corners and then meter out the power on the exit.
What a pity the marketing bods decided to install a Boost paddle that increases torque by 22lb ft for 10 seconds. A ‘kickdown’, prompted by a big old swing on the accelerator pedal, would surely feel far more intuitive. Or better still, give us all the torque all the time.
Despite having sand kicked in its face by the Porsche and Polestar, the i5 rarely feels out-gunned by its rivals when the roads begin to twist, turn and become vaguely interesting. Like the Macan, the i5 feels poised and capable, like it’s always operating well within its dynamic limits. Sure, it rolls, pitches and dives to a greater degree than the other two over the same roads. But its body movements are so well controlled and progressive, its steering so quick and well-weighted, and its brakes so powerful and easy to modulate that you can really lean on the i5. It’s a 2355kg electric family estate you can hustle along with terrific confidence, and, more importantly, with a grin on your face.
Polestar 4 vs Porsche Macan vs BMW i5: the final reckoning
Working out that the Polestar 4 gets the bronze medal is far easier than splitting the BMW and the Porsche.
I had high hopes for this Sino-Swede. Unencumbered by combustion heritage, Polestar has surfed a brave and bold design-led wave of success, and the genre-bending 4 continues that trend. A brilliantly executed and lush cabin with acres of lounging room, an intuitive infotainment system (so far as one-screen systems go) and styling that makes its rivals look staid – brilliant stuff, rounded off with 300 miles or more of real-world range and the kind of acceleration usually reserved for McLaren drivers.
Frustrating, then, that all this promise is let down by a brittle and intrusive ride quality, ho-hum levels of cabin refinement and chassis dynamics that really don’t feel up to managing 2355kg of very fast-moving metal over roads that would put a glint in the eyes of the Porsche and BMW. And for me that digital rear-view mirror is maddening. Some others on the team found it less irksome, it should be noted.
The i5’s cosseting comfort, refinement, proper swallow-all versatility and highly accessible performance make it near-perfect family transport. Yes, you may find yourself cursing its range and ho-hum charging speed now and then, but learning to live with its ritzy-glitzy cabin design is easy enough. It only takes a few miles to realise the money has been intelligently spent, imbuing the BMW with refinement levels and a ride quality the others cannot match. Better to really enjoy driving every mile of those shorter journeys than endure being rattled about on longer trips in the Polestar, yes?
For a 2330kg Porsche with no chainsaw flat-six in sight, the Macan is impressively rewarding to steer down any road. It’ll handle daily commutes, longer trips and family logistics with ease, and you’ll get to say you own a Porsche, even if it is frumpy and terrifically dull to look at in this spec, like a lardy Stormtrooper that’s been at the pies, has the cabin ambience of a coal mine in a power cut and lacks any real sense of occasion.
The Macan squeezes ahead then, in a photo finish that’s also a snapshot of an industry doing its best to weather multiple overlapping storms.
Polestar 4 vs Porsche Macan vs BMW i5: the verdict
First place
Porsche Macan
Class-leading dynamism; decent versatility; solid range and performance
Second place
BMW i5
Inefficient. But refinement, loadbay and pace are big positives for families
Third place
Polestar 4
Fast, with a lovely, well-equipped cabin. But lacks refinement and the ride’s abrupt