The human desire to go fast is old, dating back at least as far as the first time some adventurous Yamnaya saw a horse on the Pontic-Caspian steppe and thought, “I bet if I jumped on that thing’s back, it would be faster than walking.”
A thousand years later, someone else invented the wheel—and the chariot—and humanity was ready to roll. Now, about five millennia since that first horseback ride, equestrianism is mostly a leisure activity, and we drive cars, propelled by motors with more power than an entire herd of beasts could muster.
Acceleration, top speed, and lap times are the usual ways we quantify that performance, and performance electric vehicles are currently in an arms race to see which one can hit 60 mph in the least amount of time. But measuring a car’s performance is easy—all you need is a stopwatch and a track. How about measuring the effect of car performance on the driver? That’s a question Polestar is trying to answer with researchers at the University of Oxford.
“As electric cars redefine what performance can be, we wanted to understand something that can’t be captured by a specification sheet alone: the human experience behind the wheel,” said Christian Samson, Polestar’s head of product attributes. “Working with University of Oxford allows us to look at performance through a different lens—connecting the engineering of the car with the experience of the person driving it.”
The pilot study involved 12 drivers who track-tested both rear- and all-wheel-drive versions of the Polestar 4 at a track in Sweden. The Polestar 4 is the OEM’s midsize crossover, a compelling Porsche Macan alternative that you can sadly no longer buy here in the US. The drivers were instrumented with heart rate monitors and skullcaps studded with electrodes, plus the cars’ gaze-tracking driver monitoring system to gather physiological data, which was combined with telemetry from the cars and subjective interview assessments after the fact. While being measured, drivers lapped the Gotland Ring circuit gently, then dynamically.