The one with the rear window is the cheap one

The Polestar 4 coupé is the car with no rear window. Polestar took the glass out, put a camera above the roofline, fed it to a screen where the mirror used to be, and then spent two years explaining why that was fine. The Polestar 4 SUV, launched this morning, is the same car with the window put back. It is also the cheaper of the two.

£54,750 buys a Rear motor on the Business pack, against £56,750 for a coupé in the same specification. The gap holds all the way up and widens with the second motor: £58,750 against £60,750 on the Prime pack, then £60,750 against £63,750 and £64,750 against £67,750 for the Dual motor. Even the quick one is cheaper. A Dual motor with the Prime and Performance packs is £68,250 where the coupé is £71,250.

It also goes further. Polestar quotes 391 miles for the rear motor SUV against 385 for the coupé, and 373 against 367 for the dual motor, out of the same 100 kWh pack — which is not what you expect from a car 22 mm taller and up to 35 kg heavier. The boot is where the shape does its work: 530 litres loaded to the seatbacks, 655 to the inner roof, and 1,665 with the second row folded. Rear headroom is up two and a half centimetres, and the panoramic glass roof now runs the full length of the car to the tailgate.

What you give up for all that is nothing you can measure. Same 400 volt architecture, same 100 kWh, same 200 kW peak, same 3.9 seconds to 62 mph with the dual motor. The digital rear-view mirror the coupé had no choice about is a £600 option on a car that already has a mirror and a window, which is the right way round.

The awkward comparison is not with the coupé, it is with everything else at the money, because 200 kW is the softest number on this car. A BMW iX3 40 is £53,250, goes 395 miles and takes 300 kW. A Volvo EX60 Single Motor is £56,860 for 385 miles at 320 kW. A Mercedes GLC 250 Sport is £55,495 for 389 miles, also at 320 kW. All three do 10 to 80% in around twenty minutes. The Polestar takes thirty. On the school run that is invisible. Twice on the way to Scotland it is an hour of your day.

The Performance pack is £3,500 and costs fifty miles. It brings recalibrated ZF active dampers, Brembo brakes with callipers in Swedish gold, and 22-inch forged wheels on Pirelli P Zeros, and it drops the dual motor's 373 miles to 323. It can only be had on top of the £4,000 Prime pack, so the cheapest way to own one is £68,250 — the price of a Volvo EX60 Twin Motor Performance that goes 503 miles.

Two of the headline features are not in the car yet. Vehicle-to-load, which pushes up to 3.3 kW through a certified adapter into whatever you plug into it, and a Camping mode that turns the parked car into a climate-controlled room with the screens, lights and heating still running, both arrive in a software update — and they arrive for every Polestar 4, not only this one, which is the decent way to do it. Google Gemini has already replaced Google Assistant across Polestar's markets.

The cars are built in Busan, South Korea, where production started in the spring, and Polestar says the first shipment is on the water. First deliveries are promised before the end of the year, though an order placed on the configurator today is quoted for January or February. Until 30 September there is £4,000 off every variant for cash buyers and Polestar's own finance, which takes the entry car to £50,750 and makes it, briefly, cheaper than the iX3 that out-charges it.

Which leaves the coupé somewhere uncomfortable. It costs more, goes less far, carries less, and you still cannot see out of the back of it. Polestar spent two years arguing that the missing glass did not matter. It has now built the car that admits it did.