Polestar put a rear window on the 4, and called the result an SUV

Knock, knock. Autogefühl's Thomas Vogt opened his walkaround that way, standing at the tail of a car that spent two years being famous for a missing pane of glass. The Polestar 4 coupe never had a rear window. The new Polestar 4 SUV does. Polestar started taking orders on 2 September, priced the thing under the coupe, and left the original on sale beside it.

That is a quieter confession than a recall, and a funnier one. Polestar spent a product cycle arguing that a roof-mounted camera and a digital mirror were the grown-up answer. Enough buyers asked for glass, dogs and a squarer hole in the back that Polestar engineered 48 new parts, according to CAR Magazine, and built a second body on the same car.

What Car?'s first look refuses the badge. The reviewer lined the 4 SUV up against the Audi A6 Avant e-tron, BMW i5 Touring and Volkswagen ID.7 Tourer, and said Polestar wants this body to take about 70 percent of all Polestar 4 sales. The boot is 530 litres to the parcel shelf, four litres more than the coupe on paper. The useful change is height: load to the roof and Independent quotes 655 litres, or 1,665 litres with the 60/40 rear seats folded. Add the frunk and Polestar's total storage figure is 1,680 litres.

Second-row headroom grows 25 mm. Full-length roof rails are rated to 100 kg. Vehicle-to-load is coming across the Polestar 4 range at 3.3 kW through an adapter, with a camping mode that keeps climate and entertainment running while the car sits still. Everything Electric's Robert Llewellyn, crawling around the tail with the glee of a man who has found a retractable tow hook, put the braked rating at 2,000 kg and blamed “dog owners” for the extra cuboid. He then admitted most dogs he has known would fit “very happily.”

Polestar CEO Michael Lohscheller told CAR the brief in plainer language. “When we looked at it, we saw some people wanted more practicality, more functionality, some people have dogs, and you will see that when they're next to each other the new derivative is really more practical,” he said. “It's not for everyone, some people love this rear window, but we now have two derivatives of our best-selling model.”

The window itself is not a panoramic wall of glass. Vogt could see daylight in the conventional mirror and still called the aperture small. Polestar will sell the coupe's digital mirror as an option for anyone who stacks the boot to the roof. What Car?'s 6-foot-2 reviewer found the driving position more SUV than estate, with thin pillars and a commanding view, then grumbled that steering-wheel and mirror adjustment still live in the 15.4-inch touchscreen.

Every 4 SUV uses the Geely SEA architecture and a 100 kWh pack. Testers treat about 94 kWh as usable. The rear-motor car makes 268 hp, hits 62 mph in 7.3 seconds and is rated at up to 391 miles WLTP, six miles more than the coupe despite the boxier tail. Dual-motor all-wheel drive is 536 hp, 3.9 seconds and up to 373 miles. DC charging peaks at 200 kW; 10 to 80 percent takes about half an hour.

That is the same 400-volt system the coupe already had. Vogt's most useful comparison was not Tesla. It was Polestar's own 3, which is only about 10 centimetres longer, now runs 800-volt hardware and charges faster after its recent update. The 4 SUV undercuts it on price: German list starts at €57,900 for the rear-motor car, €65,900 for dual-motor and €76,300 with the Performance pack. UK prices start at £54,750, £2,000 below the coupe, with dual-motor from £60,750 and the Performance pack at £68,250. Vogt's 22-inch Brembo car, adaptive ZF dampers included, sat close to €80,000 on German glass.

His real-world range sketch was about 500 kilometres, or 300 miles, in mixed use. That is a tester's estimate, not a laboratory figure, and it still leaves the 4 SUV in the long-legged part of the compact-executive class without pretending it is a charging-speed story. Llewellyn, who recently ran a Polestar 3 to Italy and back without thinking about range, called 200 kW “pretty fast” and spent more time on the new roof rails, the first he had seen on a Polestar, and on a glass roof he once slept under for three hours in the Alps.

Production started in Busan, South Korea, in the second quarter of 2026. First customer cars are due in the fourth quarter. Polestar UK managing director Matt Galvin sold the shape as mixed parentage. “The Polestar 4 SUV combines the usability of an estate with the presence of an SUV, while delivering the design, performance and sustainability drivers expect from a Polestar,” he said. “It's about taking the best qualities of both, delivering enhanced practicality for the modern family. And of course, the car has the 'look back factor' every time you walk away.”

Electrek notes the South Korean plant would have been a cleaner fit for the United States than a China-built coupe, a decision that now sits awkwardly against the connected-vehicle rules that have already pushed Polestar out of that market. The 4 SUV is therefore a European and rest-of-world volume bet: keep the coupe for the people who liked the stunt, sell the window to everyone else, and try to make the best-selling model do more of the work. Forty-eight new parts is a cheap way to test whether the stunt was the product, or just the poster.