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A photo of the Polestar 2 outdoors.

Recall Alert: The Polestar 2 Has Even More Problems Than We Thought

First impressions are incredibly important for new automakers. Although Polestar has a connection to Volvo, the EV maker is actively trying to stand on its own two feet. The last month has been quite rough for Polestar, with two separate recalls issued for its Tesla Model 3 competitor, the Polestar 2. The first recall saw …

First impressions are incredibly important for new automakers. Although Polestar has a connection to Volvo, the EV maker is actively trying to stand on its own two feet. The last month has been quite rough for Polestar, with two separate recalls issued for its Tesla Model 3 competitor, the Polestar 2. The first recall saw the EV sedan randomly shutting off, while this new recall focuses on a problem with faulty inverters. Regardless, Polestar claims there are 4,586 affected vehicles.

What was the Polestar 2 recalled for in the first place?

A photo of the Polestar 2 outdoors.
Polestar 2 | Polestar

At the beginning of October, we saw Roadshow reporting that a new recall for the Polestar 2 would affect almost all vehicles delivered in Europe and China. The main fault was that the vehicles would randomly shut down without warning. To make things worse, Polestar hasn’t published an official explanation of why this is happening. Thankfully, at the time of writing, no accidents have been linked to this fault.

However, since the Polestar is such a new model and parts are so hard to come by, InsideEVs reports that some owners have waited over a month for a fix. While the Tesla Model 3 certainly experienced growing pains of its own, they were never quite this severe. Since the issue hasn’t been officially diagnosed, we still don’t know if it is a software or a physical issue.

So what’s wrong now?

As the world prepared for its first socially distanced Halloween, Polestar was living its own horror story. On October 29th, the brand recalled the Polestar 2 yet again. Unlike the first time, however, the brand clearly outlined two distinct issues with simple fixes.

The first has to do with the Polestar 2’s inverters. According to Polestar, the inverters transform the battery pack’s energy into the power required by the electric motors. This means that one of the most important parts of the Polestar 2 is not working as intended. According to Polestar, there are 4,586 vehicles affected.

It doesn’t stop there since there is another faulty part in this latest recall. According to Polestar, the High Voltage Coolant Heater (HVCH) also needs replacing. In short, the HVCH works to heat both the batteries and the car’s cabin. According to Polestar, the number of affected vehicles is 3,150.

How will Polestar fix all of these cars?

A photo of the Polestar 2 at an auto show.
Polestar 2 | Jörg Carstensen/picture alliance via Getty Images

As you’d imagine, a huge chunk of the company’s reputation is on the line, so Polestar has responded swiftly. In their recent press release, the brand stated that it would begin contacting customers on November 2nd. From there, Polestar claims that these problems are fixable in one trip to the dealer’s workshop. However, given that these problems affect thousands of vehicles, servicing all of them could very well take a significant amount of time.

Since the Polestar 2 hasn’t reached the U.S. market just yet, there are no vehicles to recall. However, Polestar stated that new and undelivered vehicles would receive these fixes before reaching their new homes. The result is that Polestar is fixing customer cars and brand-new ones. As of writing, there’s no official estimation as to when these issues could be resolved.

Polestar is also working on updating all of its vehicles to be compatible with over-the-air updates. Whether that is to add new features or troubleshoot potential future problems remains to be seen.

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