Text | Hula circle
Attracted to the outside and fallen for the inside, people build up feelings for everything in the world, and the process is more or less the same.
Modern industrial design was conquered by less is more minimalism, from Apple to Braun, the classic minimalist design of recent decades has been praised and is still a source of inspiration for designers today. When the once non-mainstream minimalism jumped into the mainstream, the understanding of the word minimalism was inevitable, and misunderstandings and deviations began to appear.
If we focus only on appearances, it is easy to understand minimalism simply and crudely as cutting out everything that is possible to be omitted and smoothing out everything that can be leveled. When this line of thinking tends to extreme, it is easy to move towards the opposite of simplicity for the sake of simplicity, regardless of the nature of practicality. When such extreme practices are also interpreted as minimalist, minimalist design gradually degenerates into metaphysics.
If you look at Nordic design, which is known for its simplicity, you'll see that "simplicity" is never a simple thing. One-way simplification is of course easy, but it may lead to the wrong path of simplification for the sake of simplification. The classic minimalist works are all a balance between the two sides: this is a delicate positioning between "addition" and "subtraction", not a superficial stripping.
Get out of the narrowness of separation
Rooted in the Nordic country of Sweden, Polestar's unique minimalist design has been an iconic brand feature since its inception. Since Polestar 1 pioneered and laid the design language of the Polestar family, Polar star 2 shows us a new interpretation of this simple style on the four-door model.
Polestar is a rare, and the current CEO does the design of the cutting-edge car brand, which naturally has a higher emphasis on body styling. The exterior design of the Polar Star 2 is dominated by pure straight lines, supplemented by clever transition arcs. The unique style combines boldness and understatedness, highlighting the overall image of simplicity, quietness and purity.
Beneath its ultra-minimalist exterior lies a high-strength, sturdy body that has earned an ANCAP five-star safety rating. Polar star 2's pursuit of design has never affected the value of the user's life. Like the ultimate minimalist design, it is safe and trustworthy, and it is also the gene of the Polar Star brand.
However, the simplicity of these overall dimensions does not mean boring and cold, and PoleStar 2 is also full of avant-garde temperament in addition to simplicity. Polar Star's design department shows us what a true minimalist philosophy is, with exquisite details that highlight the futuristic sense everywhere, without destroying the simplicity and purity of the whole, but also satisfying the higher pursuit of functionality, just the right embellishment.
Typical examples, such as polar star 2's unique bezel-less exterior mirrors. The traditional exterior mirror housing is fixed, and the internal lens angle changes to meet the line of sight requirements. This structure is cumbersome but mature reality, and Polar Star creatively integrates the lenses of the exterior mirror with the shell, which requires the rearview mirror as a whole to accurately adjust the angle to meet the needs of the lens field of view adjustment.
Is such an exception, just for the sake of structural simplification, for the sake of visual effects and clean minimalism? Of course, that's more than that. The bezel-less mirror removes a circle of voids from the lens to the housing, allowing the rearview lenses to maximize the area. As a result, the wind resistance under the same lens area can be smaller, and the field of view of the rearview mirror under the same wind resistance can be larger - this is not to simplify and simplify, but to win-win between aesthetics and practicality.
Therefore, Nordic style minimalism is often easy to imitate and difficult to learn the essence, because it is not only a blind subtraction on the surface, but also a new way of thinking based on the inside and based on the bottom.
Polar's journey of design exploration continues. Recently, Polar Star created a special Polar Star 2 "Arctic Circle Special Edition". Inspired by the Winter Snow Rally, it is based on the Polestar 2 Dual Motor Long Endurance Edition with a high-performance kit. The Arctic Circle Special Edition has been increased by 30 mm in height, equipped with custom 19-inch tires with 4 mm snow studs, shock absorbers and springs that have been specially snow-tuned, and customized racing seats have been added to the car, giving it the look of an ice rally car.
HLINS three-flow valve shock absorbers, which are adjusted to 9th gear front and rear and equipped with auxiliary adjustment lining, are designed to accommodate the extreme speed of snow and ice roads; the front and rear pillar brackets in the car are equipped to improve torsional stiffness and steering responsiveness; the powerful power of up to 350 kW and 680 Nm of torque is designed to navigate the snow and ice; the carbon fiber skid plate added to the front bumper is designed to provide additional bottom protection...
On polar star 2 "Arctic Circle Special Edition", no change is superfluous and useless, which is the true essence of minimalism. Polar star created this "Arctic Circle Special Edition" to show Pole Star's deep understanding of the extreme cold environment and the pursuit of high performance to meet diversified driving needs.
Minimalism is the result of both the inside and the outside
For a Nordic brand like Polar Star, which has minimalist thinking engraved in its genes, simple and pure design is not the purpose, but the result of the inside and outside.
Recently, Polestar has previewed the upcoming new car in advance, the new pure electric 4-door GT coupe Polar star 5 body-in-white structure. The new car will be based on an all-aluminium bonding platform developed by the Polestar UK team, which will give polestar 5 industry-leading performance, stiffness and safety.
For modern cars, the body in white is the skeleton and foundation of the whole vehicle, which directly determines the performance orientation and positioning level of a model. Friends familiar with automotive technology should know that aluminum has always been one of the "luxury goods" in many body materials. Most car companies use limited aluminum for key parts of the body, and all-aluminum bodies are quite rare because of their high cost and complex production.
At Polestar's Coventry R&D Centre, more than 280 of the industry's top engineers have developed a newly designed all-aluminium bonding platform for Polestar 5. Such a structure has faced the regret that the mass production quality is not stable enough, but the engineers of the British R&D team of Polar Star, with their rich experience in small-batch customized high-end sports car engineering for many years, have developed a new set of manufacturing processes, improved speed and overcome quality stability problems.
Compared with the commonly used body material steel, aluminum is only about 1/3 of the density of steel, so aluminum has always been regarded as an ideal lightweight body material. Thanks to the all-aluminum construction, the Polestar 5's body-in-white weight is expected to be lower than that of a smaller sedan without compromising other aspects of the body's performance, including safety. As a pure electric vehicle model, the lighter body-in-white weight means that the vehicle weight can be lighter, resulting in longer cruising range and better performance.
At the same time, because aluminum can use cast parts, extremely high structural stiffness can be achieved at very low weights. Polestar 5's all-aluminum platform also uses a large number of bonding processes, which can further improve the stiffness of the vehicle due to the continuity of the structural adhesive. It is precisely by relying on the all-aluminum material + bonding process that the Polestar 5 will have a body torsional stiffness that far exceeds that of traditional two-seater sports cars or even supercars.
With the strong support of the underlying structure, the design can really do what it wants, and the designer has more freedom to wield pen and ink. It is also with these that the appearance of the Precept concept car, the inspiration for the Polestar 5, can be brought into reality almost exactly by the production car.
Therefore, the external minimalist aesthetic is inseparable from the support of the internal engineering level. Polestar's engineering research and development department is not based on minimalism as the philosophy, all using aluminum to create the body and platform of Polar star 5, breaking through the obstacles in engineering and manufacturing in simplicity, which realizes the high performance of the all-aluminum bonding platform. It is this engineering miracle that supports the ultimate minimalist design in our eyes.
Polar star has its own methodology for minimalism. At the design level, its understanding of minimalism has jumped out of the cliché, which is to simplify the complex rather than "simplify for the sake of simplicity"; at the brand level, minimalism is deeply rooted in the brand gene and not limited to design, and the engineering team is also using minimalism as a guiding philosophy to promote engineering research and development innovation.
Anyone can emulate the minimalist design of subtraction, but at any time it may lead to oversimplification and counter-increasing cumbersome misunderstandings; the appearance of minimalism is not difficult to describe, but it requires engineering strength to support such beauty. The biggest difference between Polar Star and other brands is that its minimalist philosophy is rooted in the brain.