Remember the sheer joy of finding a Hot Wheels stand in a shop when you were a kid? Spending ages spinning the rack around, checking out every single car, trying to find the coolest one, daydreaming about owning the real thing one day but—more urgently— trying to work out a strategy to convince the responsible adult in your life to buy you the Hot Wheels version in the meantime?
For most of us, for many of the cars we love, the Hot Wheels version is as close as we’ll ever get to owning the real thing. Love alone does not buy you a Corvette, sadly.
The adult version of this situation occurs at motor shows, where manufacturers tease us with stunning concept cars. We fall in love with the sleek lines and the sexy profile. We pore over the list of features and marvel at the incredible ingenuity and innovation. But we know we’ll never get to drive one, let alone own one. Why? Not because the responsible adult in our lives (presumably a partner now, rather than a parent) won’t buy them for us, but because most concept cars never go on to become reality. They are a tease. A false promise. And—worse—if they do ever get made, they’re so watered down that much of what made us desire the car in the first place has disappeared.
So it was with some interest that we noted the sexiest supercar to be unveiled at last year’s Munich motor show, the Polestar Synergy, might—just might—go into production. Certainly, Polestar’s design boss, Maximillian Missoni, says the Synergy is something “we’d like to do”. There are no production plans yet, but Missoni is reported as saying he believes the positive public response means the concept is “something we should take further”. There is room in the Polestar line-up for a supercar, after all.
Let’s take a step back and see why the Polestar Synergy was turning so many heads at Munich.
Just look at it.
The Polestar Synergy is an electric fantasy supercar that combines three winning designs which took the honours in the 2022 Polestar Design Competition (from a field of over 600 entries). Entrants responded to a brief to “design a Polestar vehicle centred around the experience of performance, providing an advanced technical story that enables this in a sustainable way”. After shortlisting ten designs, the judging panel selected two exterior design winners and one interior design winner. The three designers then collaborated with Polestar over a six-month period to produce the Polestar Synergy.
The design is supposedly inspired by a hammerhead shark and features hollowed out volumes, massive wheels on all four corners, and a cockpit that is part race car, part fighter jet—with a glass canopy that flips up to allow the driver in and out.
This single-seater is 1.07 metres tall and 4.65 metres long and very much has a Le Mans hypercar vibe to it. The whole vehicle sits so low to the ground driving through your average speed-hump loving, pot-hole riddled suburban street would be completely impossible, but who cares about practicality at this point?
If the exterior is cool, the interior is a rev-head’s science-fiction fantasy. It has a built-in helmet with an augmented reality visor that shows the driver track and road data.
The steering yoke provides biometric data. It literally has a heartbeat monitor on it. And the “floating” digital dash has not only a speedo but a G-force meter. You just want to take the Polestar Synergy out onto the track to see how high you can make the numbers go on all three of those meters!
But will we ever get the chance? Will Polestar finally add a supercar to their line-up and will the Synergy be it? Only time will tell. In the meantime, we can buy the Hot Wheels version, as Polestar has done a deal with Mattel to make its famous 1/64th scale models of the vehicle. Go find your nearest Hot Wheels stand. The daydreaming starts now.
