We’ve been wrong all along when it comes to hybrids
We all know it: that horrible moment when you realize you’ve misunderstood a word, or used it so wrong that the utter embarrassment of suddenly being labeled a total idiot is almost too much to admit . It’s happened to me before, of course, but never as bad as it is now. Okay, butt bare: I have, until this moment, completely misunderstood the word ‘hybrid’.
That’s partly my fault, because I’m incredibly stupid, but I blame most of the blame on the Ugly Monster that is the auto industry. I could have used my first experience of what I thought was hybrid driving – Prius, 1998, drunken driving on Fulham Road – to illustrate what I thought the meaning of this then new term was: a petrol car with lots of batteries that does not run on electricity alone too often. But like the rest of the world, I was tricked by the PR chatter who claims that the electrons in a hybrid do just as much as the fossil part.
That’s how it’s always been
A new car is released, they all shout ‘it’s a hybrid!’ and we fall en masse into each other’s arms sobbing. We completely ignore the fact that it’s really just a normal car carrying a whole bunch of batteries that allow at most 15 kilometers of quiet electric driving, with the acceleration of a Ford Anglia on the hottest day of the year.
From this I deduced that hybrid cars are just as capable of doing two different things as I am, when I claim to be half-nothing and half-dentist, because I once manually removed a baby tooth from a child (yes, I can meanwhile again through one door with Youth Care and I admit that that Land Cruiser was perhaps a bit much of a good thing).
The Polestar 1 is really a hybrid
But now. Now I’ve ridden something called the Polestar 1, and that is (after careful consideration, the aforementioned moment of horrific realization, the long-awaited yet sunken acceptance, and deep apologies for having been totally fraudulently talking about driving hybrid cars) the first hybrid I’ve ever driven. It has a role as an electric vehicle and a role as a petrol car. I had no idea such a thing even existed.
The first indication of its actual usefulness presents itself when you turn it on. My blind spot for hybrids has preprogrammed my brain in such a way that when I look at the electric range and see ’20 kilometers’, I immediately think: ‘Oooh, that’s nice.’ While it is of course virtually worthless. The Polestar 1 says ‘120 kilometers’ and I think: ‘Look, you can do something with that.’
A large total range and a lot of power
It only gets better when you notice that the thing is still pretty smooth too, in its electric mode, and that range doesn’t even drop like your health percentage in a late eighties shooter video game. And all the while another screen shows you that you still have almost 500 kilometers of range from the generous turbocharged four-cylinder that you haven’t even touched yet. If you do, you’ll have about 600 horsepower to play with, which is more than enough to drive all the M3/RS 4-style cars (which people don’t seem to buy as often as they used to) to gland.
You can use the petrol engine to recharge the batteries, you can ‘sail’, you can choose from all kinds of 4WD configurations – it’s a phenomenal piece of engineering. It’s the only hybrid I’ve ever driven and it already lives up to the straitjacket that seems to be the next logical step for cars in the UK: electric in the city, combustion engine for the longer trips.
He has a few drawbacks. His driving is a bit on the aggressive side, and he costs 160,000 euros. Oh, and the legislators want these things dead, which is stupid because this is the first hybrid that fits most people’s needs.
