Melting into a crowd is not a fate likely to befall the Polestar 1  – unless the crowd is full of delightfully wacky turbocharged, supercharged and electrified £140,000 coupés with rally-style suspension. Which seems unlikely. 

But not all cars can be so bonkers. Not even all Polestars, which will, in future, all be battery-only EVs. So in conversation with Polestar designer Max Missoni, and some other designers and engineers recently, I’ve asked the question: when a car doesn’t have an internal combustion engine – which is something that defines so much of the driving experience, especially for performance cars – what becomes the great differentiator? 

Answer: it depends who you ask. Generally accepted, it won’t be the powertrain. Yes, there are different types of electric motor and you can put them in different places. But the whoosh and noise, or absence thereof, is much the same. They’re fun, but not so different from one another. 

EV hardware is uniformly heavy and takes up a lot of room, so battery packs tend to go in the same place, low in the car, which means it’s harder to differentiate ride and handling. The Jaguar I-Pace is a sportier drive than an Audi E-tron, of a fashion. But they’re more alike than an F-Pace and a Q5, or an XJ and A8.