2025 Polestar Polestar 3

We have owned this vehicle for about 4 months. During that time, it has displayed dozens of error messages about the vehicle's safety systems. Most commonly, it indicates that the safety systems are not available at all. There are also persistent warning lights about faults in the safety systems. Even when they are working, the ongoing warnings, issues and randomly occurring failures of these systems make them unreliable and less safe than not having the assist systems at all. Polestar service had the vehicle for over 7 weeks but still returned it to us with active safety system failure warnings.

There is a documented bug with Polestar. If you shift the car into reverse, the rear camera comes on (point back, like it should). If you shift out of reverse, and back into reverse, the camera defaults to an overhead view. With this view it is very difficult to see what is behind you. This happens 100% of the time...it is not a "sometimes happens" bug.

When parking the car and putting the car in reverse, the cameras are activated and two views are displayed simultaneously on the head unit: 1) a 360 view is displayed; and 2) rear camera view is displayed. However when putting the car in Drive and then back in Reverse again, only the 360 view displays but NOT the Rear view camera. Subsequently drive / reverse sequences during a parking maneuver do not cause the rear camera to display again, The only way to turn the rear camera back on is to keep the car in reverse and then fiddle with the head unit to tap the appropriate button sequences to turn the rear camera back on. This is not safe.

Activation and persistence of the rearview camera. This situation occurs when selecting reverse, drive and then reverse again in short order (i.e. parallel parking, maneuvering to get into our garage with a narrow driveway and tight turn). When I initially select Reverse, the center display shows both the 360 view and the reverse camera - perfect. When I select Drive to move forward a couple of feet and realign the car, the display switches to show just the 360 view - makes sense. When I then put it back into Reverse to continue parking, the rear view camera does not come back on and only the 360 view is visible. Based on my reading of the regulations, if the car is in reverse, the rear view camera should be active and show on the screen. This is a significant safety issue and one that Polestar claims is not and that their software is operating as designed.

According to the NHTSA documentation, "REQUIREMENT: The rear visibility system must default to the rearview image meeting the requirements of S5.5.1 and S5.5.2 (S6.2.1 and S6.2.2) at the beginning of each backing event regardless of any modification to the field of view the driver has previously selected." The Polestar 3 does show the rearview camera upon initially entering reverse, but if the car is placed in drive and then placed back into reverse, only the top-down "bird-eye" view is displayed. The driver must manually configure the camera to show the rear view again. This would appear to be a violation of this requirement.

The rear view parking camera software is defective. If you put the car into reverse, the rear parking camera view comes up (as intended). However, if you put the car into drive and then back into reverse (as if you are making some parking adjustments in a parking lot), the rear parking camera view does NOT come back up. In fact, it requires several additional touches on the car's infotainment touchscreen to bring the rear parking camera view back up.

The issue is with the displaying of the rear view camera. When I put the car in reverse the rear view camera displays on the bottom of the screen and the 360 view at the top of the screen as it should. But if I then put the car in drive (like when parallel parking) the display changes to show just the 360 view. Then when I put the car back in reverse only the 360 degree view is shown the reverse camera view is not displayed as required. The only way to get the reverse camera view to display is to tap the screen and click on the Rear view options to get the rear view to display. This is clearly a safety issue and not following federal regulations.