Polestar, the performance brand of Volvo Cars, has reached the milestone of one hundred thousand powertrain optimisations for Volvo cars around the globe since its introduction in 2012. The milestone is reached as sales hits an all-time high in the first five months of 2017, with more than 12,000 Volvos optimised – a growth of over 30 percent compared to the same period last year.
High demand for the latest-generation Polestar optimisations of the Volvo Cars Drive-E powertrain is a key factor in the increase, with the all-new Volvo XC60 set to be included in the optimisation range from July.
The most popular Volvo model for optimisation is the first-generation XC60, closely followed by the XC90 and V60, with China, Sweden and the United States as the top three markets in terms of sales volumes.
The latest Polestar optimisation affects five key areas of the powertrain in standard Volvo road cars, including engine performance, throttle response, gearshift speed, gear-hold functionality and off-throttle response. The changes are made to increase driving pleasure and performance, based on learnings from thousands of laps on racing circuits all over the world by Cyan Racing, the motorsport partner of Polestar.
All changes of the Polestar Optimisation are made with certified emissions, fuel consumption, service intervals and Volvo warranties unchanged.
Polestar is Volvo Car Group’s performance road car brand and was founded by Polestar Racing, today known as Cyan Racing. Polestar’s birth was a result of Cyan Racing engineers’ desire to explore how technology behind the multiple title-winning success in racing could be applied to the performance of roadgoing Volvo cars, on all roads and conditions in everyday life.
The first Polestar-optimised Volvo cars, based on the S60 and V60, were ready in 2012. Three years later in 2015, Volvo Cars acquired Polestar Performance. Today, Polestar builds the S60 and V60 Polestar, a 367bhp performance number with over 250 developments over-and-above the standard Volvo products. The brand also offers Polestar Engineered performance hardware upgrades and powertrain software optimisations for existing Volvo products. 
Check out the Volvo Polestar XC90 T8.
