Selling a dead or wrecked Polestar

Below: how a Swedish racing team turned into a car maker, how NHTSA complaints split across the four Polestar models, and which model years the EPA lists.

From touring-car team to car brand

Polestar started on the track. Wikipedia traces it to Flash Engineering, a Swedish team founded in 1996 to race in the Swedish Touring Car Championship. The team was later sold and renamed Polestar Racing, and in the late 2000s it began modifying Volvos for racing. The article's examples of its tuning work are "engine optimizations with retained warranty and unchanged fuel consumption and emissions."

The car company came later. In October 2017, Volvo Cars and Geely Holding announced that Polestar would become a standalone brand focused on electric cars. Its operational headquarters is in Torslanda, Sweden, and its legal home is Bristol, England.

The first car was the Polestar 1, shown on October 17, 2017: a 2+2 coupe that Wikipedia says was inspired by Volvo's 2013 Concept Coupe, with touches of the Volvo P1800. Chengdu, China, was home to its own Polestar Production Centre, which turned the car out between 2019 and 2021, never more than 500 in a year. In its final year a limited gold-painted version came out.

The Polestar 2 had its public debut at the 2019 Geneva Motor Show and is built at Volvo Cars' existing plant in Taizhou, China. Its 2024 model-year refresh switched the single-motor version to rear-wheel drive.

Polestar complaints on file at NHTSA

Every Polestar row in this table is a complaint an owner mailed to NHTSA, the federal safety agency, up to October 10, 2026. Each tells one owner's story. It is not proof that a part failed, and the tally is not a reliability rating.

Two things shape these numbers. The Polestar 2 holds 593 of the 674, and it is also the current model with the most years on the road, so it has had the longest to collect them. The Polestar 3 and 4 only reach back to model year 2025. A car on sale for two model years has had fewer months in which owners could write in, so those small counts say little yet. The Polestar 1 sits at zero, but it was also built in small numbers.

Selling a Polestar that won't move

A Polestar that stops working is often a high-voltage battery or charging problem, a crash, or a car that simply will not wake up. If the battery pack is the issue, our EV battery guide covers whether to repair it or sell. After a collision, start with selling a wrecked or totaled car.

Leave the battery pack, wheels and trim where they are; the truck takes the complete car. What we need from you:

1. Note the model and model year. A Polestar 2 from before the 2024 refresh and one after are different cars underneath.
2. Tell us if the screen lights up, if the car can be pushed, and what is broken.
3. Mention if the title is in hand. A missing one has its own fix: selling a junk car with no title.
4. Tell us where it is parked: home, a lot, or a shop.

Rather talk to someone? Call (877) 421-6008.

Every Polestar model

Four Polestars appear in EPA fuel economy data. The year ranges below are model years; the latest may still grow.