Polestar tries to quantify what it’s like to drive a performance car
Drivers had electrodes strapped to their heads as they tested EVs on track.
Drivers had electrodes strapped to their heads as they tested EVs on track.
The short version
- Now, about five millennia since that first horseback ride, equestrianism is mostly a leisure activity, and we drive cars, propelled by motors with more power than an entire herd of beasts could muster.
- Acceleration, top speed, and lap times are the usual ways we quantify that performance, and performance electric vehicles are currently in an arms race to see which one can hit 60 mph in the least amount of time.
- But measuring a car’s performance is easy—all you need is a stopwatch and a track.
What happened
How about measuring the effect of car performance on the driver? That’s a question Polestar is trying to answer with researchers at the University of Oxford.
Why it matters
“As electric cars redefine what performance can be, we wanted to understand something that can’t be captured by a specification sheet alone: the human experience behind the wheel,” said Christian Samson, Polestar’s head of product attributes.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.