Polestar 7 Concept Is Based on Modular, Replaceable Battery

Like many progressive car companies, Polestar has tried crowdsourcing ideas. It's launched a few design challenges which young students enjoyed. Want a Polestar bike? I bet somebody has sketched one of those.

But we're here to talk about the Polestar 7, an unofficial concept by Turin-based exterior designer Dan Paduraru. We're not trying to mislead you into thinking it's an official Polestar piece, but it does look the part and centers around one very innovative idea: replacing the battery instead of charging it.

The design reminds us of modular phones. Most notably, back a few years ago, we had the LG G5 on which you could slide out a section at the bottom and install a kind of camera system, a fresh battery, or a B&O sound system. The beautiful Polestar concept also splits off a small section to give you access to its battery. It doesn't strike us as a particularly practical or easy, but it is cool.

It might seem like the history of the EV starts and ends with Tesla. However, electric cars have been around for over a century, and in that time, engineers have come up with many ideas including changing the battery instead of charging it. I think Renault tried that with the Fluence ZE.

We've seen it work quite well on scooters, yet it seems less likely to succeed on an EV, especially if it's premium. The AA and AAA is a very successful consumer product. You buy them, put them in your remote or controller, use them and throw them away... hopefully to be recycled.

But in the case of a replaceable EV battery, you have to wonder who owns the rights to it and what are the implications. Who owns the rights to that old battery? Would you trust somebody else's tech in your car? How do the diagnostics work? Also, on all modern EVs, the battery is a core piece of the car's rigidity and comes with its own crash protection. That doesn't sound like something you should mess with.