Screens can’t replace windows. What was Polestar thinking?

Open this photo in gallery:

I drove the Polestar 4 recently and found it to be a decent electric vehicle, apart from one glaring omission: a rear window.

It looks as if the engineers simply forgot the glass and haphazardly covered the opening with sheet metal. Somehow, everyone involved signed off on the design and the company started mass-producing this, a car without a rear window.

It’s absolutely baffling – a bad idea that’s indicative of the dead-end technology invading so many products. Screens on fridges. Bluetooth toothbrushes. Cars with light-up grilles and mindful meditation modes and gesture controls. And yet, for the most part, we all just shrug it off.

While a company taking a risk to try something new is commendable – like having the guy behind the iPhone design the first electric Ferrari – that doesn’t guarantee success.

For those unfamiliar with the Polestar 4, it’s a $67,700 electric four-door vehicle from a Swedish EV manufacturer that launched in 2017 as a spin-off from Volvo and its Chinese parent company Geely. The Polestar 1, a $200,000 coupe, was great to drive and could be a future classic. The Polestar 2, a $70,000 sedan, was good for its time. The Polestar 3, a $120,000 wagonish SUV, is lovely, although probably overpriced. But the Polestar 4 is a completely wrong turn.

Open this photo in gallery:

Open this photo in gallery:

I’d love to invite the Polestar execs who axed the rear window to try to parallel park this car on a busy street, then try the same experiment in a version that has a proper rear window. Call me old fashioned, but it’s nice to physically see where you’re going; looking through a window provides depth perception and visual context.

In normal cars, parallel parking is easy: you turn to look through the window, judge the distance and back in. There are, of course, regional differences in technique. In France and Italy, drivers tend to parallel park by feel – reversing until they hear the clunk of bumpers touching. In Canada, we try to avoid contact entirely, but the basics remain the same: look out the window of the direction in which you are driving.

In the Polestar 4, you look over your shoulder and face a blank wall – a useless slab of carpet with some mood lighting. Instead of a window, Polestar provides drivers with a rearview screen located where the rearview mirror should be. It shows the view from a roof-mounted rearview camera, but judging distance using an image on the screen is incredibly difficult. While there are buttons to adjust the view, it’s a fiddly and annoying process; certainly not something you can do while in traffic trying to dash into a primo parallel parking spot. (Alternatively, Polestar offers an optional semi-automated parking assistant in case you’d like to let the car park itself.)

To be fair, the digital rearview mirror isn’t an awful idea; it stays clear in the rain thanks to a small protective hood, offers a wide field of view for highway driving and is useful in big SUVs where a rear-mounted spare tire blocks most of the window (read: Land Rover Defender). Besides, a quick flick of a switch on some other vehicles transforms the screen back into a standard rearview mirror. The Polestar 4 setup would be fine if the digital screen was accompanied by a rear window. But, well, you know.

The Polestar 4’s designer, Maximilian Missoni – who has since moved to BMW – told the magazine Auto & Design that eliminating the rear window was about creating a sporty fastback roofline while preserving rear-seat headroom.

Other brands typically sacrifice rear headroom for fastback styling, which is a fine solution. For proof, look at all the coupe-shaped SUVs on the road. Alternatively, an automaker can design a more conventional SUV like the Polestar 3, which has a rear window and looks great. Or Polestar could have utilized a Kammback design with a fastback roofline abruptly cut off; it’s aerodynamic and excellent for EVs. The Honda CR-Z, the original Hyundai Ioniq and the Ferrari ‘Breadvan’ are all good examples.

In other words, removing the rear window was the result of a design dilemma entirely of Polestar’s own making.

Open this photo in gallery:

In addition, the Polestar 4’s side mirror controls are annoyingly buried in touchscreen sub-menus. Usually, these are simple buttons located on the driver’s door panel and, as far as I know, an arrangement nobody has ever complained about. It worked just fine. But Polestar is far from alone in delivering dubious high-tech “solutions” for problems that never existed in the first place. (See also: pop-out door handles.)

From the looks of its Type 00 prototype, Jaguar is about to launch a rear-windowless EV as well. Surely buyers of a luxury land yacht like that big Jag won’t often be parallel parking it – that’s a job for the valet – but please, don’t let this be the start of a trend. It’s already dangerous enough navigating busy streets shared by cars, cyclists, e-bikers and daredevil scooter pilots. Let’s not forget, modern cars need more windows, not fewer.

Open this photo in gallery:

Shopping for a new car? Check out the new Globe Drive Build and Price Tool to see the latest discounts, rebates and rates on new cars, trucks and SUVs. Click here to get your price.