Polestar has just revealed the new 4 SUV, and it might be one of those cars that makes you question why the original existed in the first place. Rather than replacing the Polestar 4 Coupé, the new SUV sits alongside it, taking the same fundamental design and editing it into something considerably more practical, without getting rid of what made the Coupé interesting.

The most immediate change is one that a lot of people were quietly waiting for, a rear window. The absence of one in the original Polestar 4 was very apparent. Rather than looking through glass, the driver was instead given a live feed on a screen, fed by a roof-mounted camera.

From a design-thinking perspective, it was a bold move, removing a fundamental architectural constraint in order to free up the surfacing behind the cabin. But it also revealed something about how far a
creative decision can be pushed before it stops feeling like an innovation and starts feeling like an overdone design. With the SUV, Polestar has quietly brought the glass back, and in doing so has perhaps admitted that the conventional and practical answer was still the right one for a car that has to serve as a daily usable vehicle, rather than a design statement on wheels.

What's interesting from a surfacing point of view is how little else has changed. The SUV gains a more upright rear, roof rails and a larger luggage area, but the front end, the lighting and the general body language all remain recognisably Polestar 4. Nothing has been diluted into generic SUV language to accommodate the extra volume, and if anything, the proportions read more naturally here than they did on the original car.

The Coupé was low and stretched, almost as though an SUV had been pushed through a wind tunnel until it emerged as a shooting brake, and while that tension was exactly what made it remarkable, it also meant the surfacing was doing a lot of work to justify the compromises that came with it. There is more volume at the back, and the roofline doesn't taper away quite so dramatically, giving the 'greenhouse' a more natural relationship with the rest of the body, yet the surfacing remains just as disciplined, with no fake vents,
unnecessary creases or black plastic cladding pretending to be aerodynamic.

Practicality has clearly been central to the brief, and it shows in details that go beyond simple packaging. The SUV offers 530 litres of luggage space, rising to 1,665 litres with the rear seats folded down, along with a 100kg roof load capacity and Vehicle-to-Load functionality that allows the car to power external equipment from the charging port. It is a car that has been engineered to be lived with on a day-to-day basis, rather than simply admired from a distance, and the design has been allowed to follow that brief rather than fight against it.

Performance hasn't been forgotten either. The rear-wheel
drive version produces 268bhp and a targeted range of 391 miles, while the dual-motor version makes 536bhp and reaches 62mph in 3.8 seconds. Prices start at £54,750, rising to £60,750 for the dual-motor car, positioning it firmly as a genuine rival to the more established electric SUVs in the segment.

The real question at the centre of all this however, is why would you now choose the original Coupé over the SUV? Well, the Coupé remains the more dramatic of the two cars, with the more distinctive roofline and the more unusual rear end, and there will always be buyers who want a design to feel a little uncompromising. But the SUV keeps almost everything that made the original 4 worth talking about as a piece of design, while resolving the dislikes that came with it.

Polestar hasn't played it safe here so much as taken an unusual idea and refined it, correcting the one decision that never quite sat well with motorists. Having seen how divisive that missing rear window proved to be, I think that might have been exactly what the 4 needed all along.