Now you might have read that post and decided "Old Man Rusty hates AI!". And you'd be wrong. Don't get me wrong I don't love that some Silicon Valley elites hoovered up the worlds data without asking, and then set some power grids alight using it all. I don't love the ethics of these companies. I don't love their attitudes. I don't love just how much money and resources are going into all of this based solely on hype and dreams. I don't love that their answer to all the critiscm is "yeah but in 6 months AGI which will solve all the worlds problems!". Buuuuuuuut. And yes, it's a big buuuuuuuuutttttt. If you want to put all that aside (and mad respect for you if you don't) the annoying thing about it all is that this isn't Crypto 3.0. There is actually some kind of useful tool here for people in my industry. They haven't just invented the worlds slowest, most expensive to run and useless database you can put links to JPEGs on.

So if I don't think it can replace me, and is nowhere near replacing me, is it still useful? In my experience, yes! I use a combination of Codex and Gemini CLI regularly to help me get work done. Before you ask I can't afford Claude, I am but a poor humble small time developer and those two are just cheaper (yes I know, heavily subsidised, but again this post isn't about the negatives). What it's great at might seem a bit confusing at first. It's great at the very obscure, detail orientated very small things. For example, you have an unsymbolicated C++ or Swift crash log. I don't care how much industry experience you have, 95% of us have NFI how to decipher one of those, and the other 5% are liars. We often struggle even just to symbolicate them. LLMs don't. They excel at language tasks, and this dear reader, is another kind of language. They can read it very well. They can interpret it, and they can then tell you what probably caused the crash and where it is. That is, to put it bluntly, insanely useful. What might have taken me hours, is now minutes. Great! Or you want to convert Objective-C code to Swift code, guess what, great at that too because it's another language based task.

Now ironically, it's also very good at the big wishy washy things. You might think that's counter-intuitive but it has so much training data that creating something which looks kind of like what you want isn't hard. Again, it's other great skill is imitation. You show it a picture of an app, it can make something like that very quickly, ignoring the details and rough edges of course. A few months ago we wanted to build a vocoder at Bjango, but we had no experience in doing that. We wanted to know if it was even possible, and if so how. So we prompted some LLMs and then later that day we had a working prototype. Working is very generous here, it didn't actually vocode, but it showed us what we wanted was indeed possible and we just had to work through it. Marc and I gave a presentation about it if you want to learn more. We ended up spending 3 months re-writing everything the AI did, but it was insanely useful to have the way forward illuminated.

The other example is more recent. I know nothing about neural nets and machine learning, but there was a project we are considering doing that needs me to learn this. So again, I turned to my LLM friends who've hoovered up the worlds data about these processes and got them to get me 70% of the way there. They explained about TensorFlow and PyTorch and Epochs and Losses and training data and so much more. I could have found all that on my own, but to have that knowledge to draw on and get me close enough to a working prototype for me to do the rest on my own was invaluable.

It's also useful if, like me, you work alone and you don't have any other humans to do code reviews or talk through problems. You can get an LLM to do that and it imitates a developer well enough to get you to realise where you might have made a mistake or where you might have gone wrong. They are also trained to be insanely upbeat, which while sometimes annoying can be a nice change from dealing with real humans.

It's also useful for what I call "fun stuff". Things that you will only use personally once or twice and you don't care about the code quality. Or things where you want to prompt an LLM into building you a fully working prototype of an idea before you go and replace everything it did with your own code. Move this up. Change this screen. No lets try linking this to this. Ok that's no good give the image a gradient fade. And so on until you get what you want. You'd be surprised how easy production ready code is to write once you have taken the time to actually prototype something and work through all your ideas.

Finally and more soberingly I know some people out there are actually using it to do their job, managing agents, scheduling tasks, performing reviews and getting it to submit code to production for other people to use. To those people I want to say two things. One is I see you, you've found a new toy and you want to see just how fast it goes, I get it. In the opinion of this humble author though, one day you're going to slam that shiny toy right into a tree. Might not be today, might not be tomorrow, but one day it's going to come back to bite you. If you're shipping code at a velocity where you don't understand it and you're not actively working on it don't forget that ultimately you're the one responsible for the outcomes. When someone can't get part of your app to work because an LLM decided JSON was an amazing storage format for indexed, sortable data. When you leak all your customers personal details to the internet. When things break and the bots just can't fix them without breaking more things...well...that's all on you. And that, dear reader, is why the title of this post is what it is. Treat everything that comes from an LLM as if the intern that just started this week did it. Double check it. Triple check. Don't assume anything it told you is true, because that's the actual job you're paid to do.

A lot of people seem to think that if the code compiles that the job is 90% done. The truth is, writing code that can compile and pass a test is literally only maybe 10-20% of my job. If the goal was simply to write something that could compile and pass a test, yes, I would indeed hand in my badge and go find a beach to retire on. If the job of a laywer was to pass a bar exam, they too would all retire. If the job of a journalist was to put the right amount of paragraphs into articles, they would too. That simply isn't how development, lawyering or writing works. Allow me to explain via two examples.

Let's start simple. There was a crash in Robot Rocket that a customer sent in. It was an unsymbolicated C++ crash so I turned to Gemini CLI to try and help me diagnose it. I told it where to find the crash ips file, what the issue was and that I wanted to know which part of my code might be responsible. In about a minute it figured out the exact line, and offerred a fix. It wanted to add a null check in front of a null variable to fix the crash. And dear reader, that would indeed have fixed the crash. Job done, right? Wrong. That's literally what I'd expect out of a developer fresh out of the education system and in their very first day at work. Because as any half decent developer knows when a crash occurs your job isn't actually to fix it. It's to determine why it happened, and what the correct way to fix it is. The code crashed because you didn't anticipate something. In this case I wrongly assumed that a method called "initialize" in an API would be called before other methods, and I was wrong. In other words, just adding a null check was ignoring the fact that the method it crashed in was setting up some configuration on an object. If you just add a null check, guess what, no configuration and suddenly you have introduced a very subtle bug that will take you much longer to find. This would lead to someone saving some important config for say a live gig with your app, opening it at the gig, and not realising half their config might not have been loaded properly. Now could I have sat there prompting an LLM into fixing it properly, sure, but I bring this example up for a reason. The LLM isn't a developer. It doesn't think like one. It doesn't have enough context to reason properly through complex projects and what the implications of making changes truly are. It's only good at imitating what a developer does.

But enough simple examples, let's go concrete. A few years ago I wanted to build my own simple podcast app, for just me. I wanted to be able to add podcasts, have their episodes sorted nicely in a list and be able to play them easily at any time. I wanted to support streaming and download. I wanted to support CarPlay. I wanted it to be so simple and bullet proof that I'd never have to think about using it. So I sat down and over the space of a week or two I coded it up. I've used it ever since and it has indeed been bullet proof. Maybe once or twice a year I might clean something up or tweak something but after those initial 2 weeks I haven't significantly changed any part of this app. It's just worked the way I wanted it to.

And isn't this exactly what the AI hype train is promising? That the AI is now good enough to do exactly the above. To replace me, to be a developer. So if that's true, here's my challenge: I want you to build an app like this for yourself. I want you to prompt (no coding allowed) your way to a fully featured podcast app. I'll even give you mine as a template:

It's a super simple 2 tab design. The first tab shows all the podcasts you've added:

The second tab shows your episodes:

And finally there's the CarPlay integration, again, not complicated:

And if you manage to get to a fully featured, bug free app that does all of the above and you love using each and every day then I will be forced to admit that LLMs are far more capable than I am giving them credit for. Again, don't hear what I'm not saying. I don't care if you get 70% of the way there and it looks kind of like my app. That's not impressive, that's an LLM imitating what I did, not actually doing it. I want a 100% complete and working app. And I want it to be built by a non developer. Someone who doesn't really know how to code, but knows how a podcast app should work. Because that kind of person would be able to hire a developer and be able to reproduce the above. So if the LLM is now good enough to be a developer, and replace one, then it should be able to do this without any issues.

If you've managed to do that, please reach out to me on Mastodon and claim your trophy. After all, perhaps I'm just holding it wrong?

For a slightly lengthier introduction about what we did and why, Marc Edwards and I gave a talk at Dev World 2025 about it, which you can watch here on YouTube.

If you're at all into audio plugins or just want to support us, please, check it out and consider buying it. It's a once off purchase for something you can keep in your audio arsenal forever.

Also, it looks pretty damn cool:

As a Tesla owner back then all I kept hearing was about how superior Tesla's were, how they were 10 years ahead and "legacy automakers" would never catch up. And I believed it too, the Model S was my first ever brand new car. My previous VW Golf was made in 2009, it had cruise control, and that was about it. So when I got into the Model S for the first time, it really did feel like the future. From the clean interior, to the massive touch screen, to all the driver assistance features...well, it kinda blew my mind. And so I internalised "Tesla's are the best, no one else can make a good EV, har har isn't that funny frunk goes up!"

Quick aside: even back then I didn't like Elon. He wasn't a proud right wing fascist, but it was obvious he was an idiot who steam rolled the actual engineers he was working with to claim their achievements as his own. I won't pretend I knew the extent to which he was messed up, but I did buy two Tesla's despite him, not because of him. I wouldn't buy one today not only because I disagree with his entire political stance, but also because I wouldn't trust Tesla to still be honouring warranties in 5 years time. It's a volatile company, run by a mad man, if you want to trust them with your life and your wallet, you do you I guess.

Enter The Wanker

Then in 2023 my wife and I went to an EV expo here in my home town of Adelaide, and we sat in, and test drove some amazing EVs. It had been a slow build up, but this was the moment I can pinpoint where I finally realised all this "legacy automaker" nonsense was just that, nonsense. Lots of companies build comparable and better EVs than Tesla. The BYD range was more affordable. The Hyundai and Kia ranges were impressive. Every single car we sat in or test drove blew us away. But most surprising was the BMW range. We test drove an iX3 and my wife instantly fell in love. It was smooth. Spacious. Someone actually thought about every aspect of the interior and driving experience and took the time to make them good. The accelerator mapping, the blended regenerative braking, the cruise control and so much more where just plain better than what Tesla had to offer. Sure you can point out the "on" button and lack of frunk and scream about how legacy automakers don't get it, but all the frunks I ever had were, in practice, very annoying to actually use. I think these legacy automakers actually know how to build a good car. Shock. Horror.

And so a short time later prompted by financing arrangements, the knowledge a new Model 3 was imminent (+me not wanting a Tesla in our lives anymore), and a deal being available on a used iX3, we pulled the trigger. I'm not much of an SUV guy, but the car really impressed me. The app was surprisingly good, the driving experience excellent and though the range was slightly shorter than what I was used to we still took it on a 2000km+ road trip with no issues.

Later that year after test driving one, I ordered a BMW i4. At this point we'd sold the model 3, Michelle was driving the iX3 and I had the Polestar. The wait time was around 12 months and I knew that would coincide with the financing arrangement we had set up. Without going into details, we'd decided to stop short term financing cars and go for a much longer ownership period. So as wanky as it sounds I had to pick my "forever car".

During the time between order and delivery (which was cancellable), I test drove and went to look at quite a few other cars. I figured if I was going to be the wanker picking a forever car, then I was going to wank it up real good. Ok, not the greatest turn of phrase, but I think you get it, I'm embarassed about being able to afford any of this and trying to deflect that with some poorly placed humour.

Cupra Born

I love little hatch backs. This car just looks so damn cool. I didn't like the drive though and a lot of the features it shipped with hadn't been approved for Australian use yet (no phone key, no connected infotainment, etc). Also my kids are giants, and they would struggle to fit in the back. I suspect the next iteration of this car will be amazing, but this one wasn't.

Volvo EX30

Not quite a hatchback, but feels like one. I checked out quite a few and got a demo of the infotainment system. I almost bought one, but the back seat room and some worries about how reliable the Android Automotive infotainment system was in the early reviews put me off. Also not a single button in sight, which felt like learning the wrong lesson from Tesla. Still, probably my second favourite EV after the i4, definitely worth checking out.

The Others I Perused

• Hyundai Ionic 5: love the look, way too big in practice.
• Kia EV 6: same, too big for my needs.
• Polestar 3: too expensive, too big, but hot damn, I like the look.
• Polestar 4: too wide...this car is 2 metres wide?! Also pricey and similar concerns about the infotainment system as the EX30 and the reliability of the back camera as your only way to see out of the back.
• Nissan Leaf: too expensive new (for what it is) and the older ones just aren't that nice. Also chademo plug instead of CCS 2 (which is the standard here in Australia for everything except a Leaf).

So in the end, I kept my order with BMW and waited.

I mean just look at how happy I am! Ribbons are really my jam! I love car dealerships! I know how to smile on camera! No you're hiding the kidney grill from this picture!

You can watch a million reviews online from people more qualified than I, but I will say that this is, hands down, the best car I've ever driven. It's comfortable, it feels effortless to drive. The cruise control and lane assist features work really well. The range is amazing. And for the nerds out there, the app is really good. The only gripes I have is that it doesn't show charging speed while charging (even though the car has this info on the dash) and that it can take up to 30s to send the car a remote command (like start the air conditioner, unlock the doors, etc). I suspect that last one is a feature, not a bug though. Unlike a Tesla you can leave the car somewhere for 2 weeks and you'll come back to pretty much the same state of charge you left it with. My Tesla's used to shed 1% a day pretty reliably.

The model I have has Apple's car key feature (the NFC version, not the UWB version) and that is rock solid reliable. You do need to make contact with the door and place your phone on a pad to use it, but it works even when your phone goes flat (the NFC stays powered on for a while) and has never failed me. It hands down beats both the Polestar phone unlock and Tesla's for reliability. Of course it comes with a regular key fob as well, but once you get used to not carrying keys it's hard to go back.

Infotainment wise one screen runs CarPlay, which works very well and the other one has all your speed and driving information. There's a heads up display, which while it looks a bit 90s is super useful in practice. The vents are physical (thank Zeus) and there are just enough buttons for things you use regularly that the touch screen isn't an issue. The actual BMW software is pretty good, though the "Apps" screen is one place they learnt the wrong lesson. Splitting all the cars functions into 30 or so apps isn't hip or trendy, it's just annoying. Once you've configured the car though, you don't really ever go back there. The car has driver profiles, which work well (remembering all your preferences, seating position, etc) though why it takes 10+ seconds to switch between them is a bit baffling.

A year later, apart from the steep price, I have no regrets, this really feels like a car I can drive for 5-10 years without issues. The point of this post isn't that you should get an i4, it's more that pretty much everyone is making good EVs now. If you're in the market for a new EV, you can and should do better than a Tesla. Even in Australia, the choice of cars in all sorts of price ranges is now quite impressive.

And finally, just to prove that some things never change, I did indeed take it to the beach. Because cars love sand and salt and you can't tell me otherwise.

Now, to answer your super important questions!

Does this mean you'll be blogging again?

Dunno.

What was it like to not post for 2 years?!

🤷‍♂️

Did you just put an emoji into a blog post? What are you, 50?

Not yet!

What happened to your very chique and definitely not out of date theme?

Yeah that's gone. I'm still learning all about the world of Jekyll Themes and am very, very lost. Maybe one day this site will look good? Maybe you're reading this in 2027 and laughing. Who knows. Life is a mystery wrapped in a taco.

Improvements

I use the app fairly regularly, and I've noticed a few improvements! Firstly the reliability of the data updating is way better. Now when I open the app, I can be confident the data will either already be up to date, or update quickly after I open it. That's a huge improvement compared to where it was six months ago. This was easily my number 1 gripe, and to see them fix it is very reassuring. I do wish what was shown on screen had a "last updated 3m ago" or similar label so I knew it was recent, but it's still a big win.

Polestar has also removed a lot of the flashing to update behaviour I mentioned in my previous post. Now you get a nice little loading indicator down the bottom to show the app is loading. Some elements still flash or dim while updating, but it's not nearly as jarring as it was.

There are still a few small bugs/quirks with the app which could be improved though. It's now very fond of telling you when things have gone wrong with little messages down the bottom, and sometimes a full screen error try again state. As far as I can tell, half of the time these appear to be errors that happened a while ago. The app should really clear these out on it's own when it becomes active, rather than displaying them to the user as it's retrying/loading the data anyway. If the app is currently refreshing, I don't need to see this, but I often do:

A small thing, I know, but these small touches really count when you want your app to be perceived as good and reliable. Seeing constant errors doesn't inspire confidence, and often the data is up to date and the error is old anyway.

Regressions

In a fun "how on earth did this pass QA" twist, this button now does, as far as I can tell, nothing:

Well...not quite nothing. It sends changes to the server and to the car, but it no longer has any effect on the amperage being drawn from an AC wall charger. I think this might be a version P2.4 regression because trying to change the charging speed in the car also does nothing. Oh you'd like to charge at 15A? That's nice, Imma keep going at 30. It's not very confidence inspiring to see a feature that once worked, just break like that...and I have no idea if/when a fix is coming. I suspect this is a bug in the car itself, not the app, but still, very disappointing.

App Charging Improvements

My biggest 2 feature requests for the app continue to be allowing a user to start/stop a charging session from the app, and also to change the charge limit. Neither of those were in the app 6 months ago, and they still aren't. 😔

Final Thoughts

Some nice reliability improvements, a regression, and really not much else 6 months later. Not great. Not terrible. At least it's improving I guess? It's going to be really interesting to see just how good Polestar is at running a software ecosystem when the new Polestar 3 launches. By all accounts it has updated hardware in it, that runs the new version of Android Automotive. Will Polestar 2 owners get all those updates in future software updates? If this were a Tesla I'd be reasonably confident in saying yes, where the hardware allows it. With Polestar, I don't feel as confident but I guess we'll see!

The Promise

The promise of SmartShift is simple. You have solar that generates power, you have batteries to store that energy in and they are an energy retailer that lets you buy and sell power at the wholesale market rate. Not just that, but they have an algorithm that can look at the expected power prices for the day, and buy and sell power at all the right times to make you money. Push one button, and away you go:

First Run Experience

After turning SmartShift on, you get access to the "Devices" tab in the Amber app. This lets you see a summary of the stats for today, as well as a page that outlines the "plan" that SmartShift has generated for the day. This shows you an outline of what SmartShift thinks the upcoming power prices will be and what it plans to do and when. It's slightly confusing because there's no time shown on the graph, but it seems like it's for the next 12 hours or so. One the same page are some buttons for manually controlling your battery. All in all it makes a good first impression. The plans it made for the second and third day I had it on looked pretty much exactly like what I would have made myself.

Contact With The Enemy

Unfortunately, like most software developers know, no plan survives contact with the enemy. And in the case of SmartShift it soon became clear that the system could only ever be as good as the forecasts it was working on. The 3 important forecast being:

• How much solar are you likely to generate today?
• How much power are you likely to need, and when?
• What will the price of power be (for exporting and importing) for the next 12 hours?

On all 3 of these, SmartShift falls short. For the first month (or so I'm told by one of the engineers who worked on it) it uses a very crude solar and usage model that seems to be (as far as I can tell) "what happened yesterday". I watched this backfire rather spectacularly on a day that was forecast for storms all day, and 10-15mm of rain. Anyone reading that forecast would know solar generation would be down for the day. Sadly SmartShift had no idea, so it happily made a plan to buy some power overnight, sell it in the morning, to make way for the incoming solar power. Not only did it end up selling this power at a loss, but when I needed it later in the day I ended up having to buy it back from the grid at even higher prices. Perhaps after the first month when the app is meant to switch to a Machine Learning model that also takes into account forecast data some of this might be solved, but it resulted in the app making a string of really bad decisions I had to keep overriding.

Then there's the forecast data for pricing. I'm sure that's a complicated thing to predict but this part is constantly wrong. The best algorithm in the world isn't going to be very effective with bad forecasting data, and that's precisely what SmartShift seems to be working with.

I spent a rather frustrating Saturday manually telling it to buy and then hold onto power that I ended up turning it off. Don't get me wrong, I see the promise, but until the forecasts are better, the algorithm will make constant mistakes. Buying high, selling low, selling when it should be holding, and so on. That it summarises it for you is nice, but watching it buy power at 29c, only to sell it at 18c isn't fun.

TL;DR

SmartShift from Amber has a lot of promise but it doesn't, in my opinion and experience yet live up to the way it's being marketed. I suspect if you turned it on and just never opened the app it would be ok, but if like me you want to check in on it everyday, you're going to end up constantly disappointed by the decisions it's making. There is something here though, with better forecast data and more historic data from their user base it will hopefully improve over time. I intend to stick with it to see if it improves, but that's because I'm really excited about the prospect of it working. If you're switching to make money, you might end up disappointed.

Finishing Thoughts

My impressions are only a week old, and I can only speak for how this works in South Australia. Each state of Australia has different power pricing and tariffs that might make the calculus there different. For example from what I can see others are posting online it's far more reliable in Queensland. As a software developer I think I have slightly more insight into this than most, but I might have also made some bad assumptions and judged the system too early. Currently as it stands, I wouldn't recommend it to other people in South Australia just yet. YMMV in other states.

If the usage and solar forecast model was better and it knew about the weather forecast, that would improve things a lot. If the future price forecast was more accurate, that would also make a huge difference. Those don't seem like impossible challenges, so they may well end up being things that get improved over time. I know Amber are actively working on both at the moment.

And in case anyone at Amber is reading this, some suggestions on the app itself and things I'd like to see:

• I'd love to be able to tweak the algorithms plan for the day and maybe even add my own input to it. If it could list in tabular form what it plans to do and let me tweak some of it (don't buy here, sell here if the price is above $x, etc that would be very interesting. I get this is an advanced use case, and it should be hidden appropriately, but still.
• There doesn't appear to be a button to pause SmartShift for a bit, you have to turn the entire thing off. It would great if you could just tell it to chill for an amount of time and have it turn back on automatically after that. Edit: I'm a wally, that's what the "Consume Battery Energy" button in the manual control section does.
• When I choose a manual action (like charging my battery) and a timeframe, it would be nice to be able to extend that time if possible. Currently if you choose an hour, it ticks down to the hour and your only option to add time is to cancel that action, and add a new one.
• There is something off about the usability of the "Live" tab. I can't quite put my finger on it, but the way what's happening is shown is confusing (a simple animation might make a huge difference there?) and the way you tap on the little coloured boxes and they expand to fill the screen is a bit jarring (again an animation here might help).

Refreshing

The Polestar 2 app is very striking in its design language, which I don't mind. When you open it, you're presented with something like this:

At first glance you might think that's amazing! Battery percentage, climate, doors, yay! The issue is you have no idea how old this data is. The app doesn't tell you. I frequently open it and see 67%, only to have that replaced with 47% at what feels like some arbitrary point in the future. Sometimes it pops up messages to let you know it failed to refresh, other times it starts flashing (changing the alpha value of the displayed content from 100% to about 30% in a rhythmic way) either the whole app, or bits of it. Not knowing how up to date this information is, if it's loading or not and sometimes just watching the entire app flashing for minutes on end isn't a great experience. Here's some quick ways to fix that:

• Remove the flashing as an indicator the app is refreshing. It's cute, but as a user it took me ages to figure out that's what it even means. We have decades of learned experiences about what something that's updating looks like, no need to re-invent that. Add a simple bit of text "Last updated 4 hours ago" and put a little refresh indicator next to it. That way a person instantly knows how old the data is, and that you're trying to update it.
• Fix whatever the issue is that causes the app not to load half the time. It seems like it sometimes tries to refresh in the background, and when that fails you open to an app that's out of date, full of error messages and you have to kill the app to get it to load.
• Related to the above, make the app and the back end service it connects to faster and more reliable. I should be able to depend on it working, not vaguely hope it does every time I open it. It's ok if it takes time to wake the car up and other things like that, I don't want the laws of physics broken, just make it reliable.

Layout

Next up, let's talk about some of the layout issues the app has:

The four tabs across the bottom are : car info, news, shop and account. To my thinking at least two of these aren't needed. I already own the Polestar...am I really going to use the app to buy another one?! I'd remove this tab bar entirely and just have the app open to car info. Have the account info and news as buttons in the app somewhere, they don't need dedicated tabs. Remove the shop entirely, or let people shop for accessories for their car instead of new cars as the default.

Next up when I tap on the already giant "Doors" button in the app, I'm taken to an entire page with an even bigger button. Is that really necessary? The animation for the page opening is nice, but I don't really need a giant picture of my car with an unlock button, why not just let me do that from the base page? I have very similar thoughts about the climate page, give me a quick way to turn climate on and off, and then also give me a way to get to more detailed settings for it.

Update 17th June 2022: A few people let me know that the little lock and fan icons on the Doors and Climate buttons are actually buttons themselves! This is great, it means there is a quick way to do those actions, but also that means that Polestar has put a button inside a button...which is not great in terms of discoverability or usability.

Charging

Next up is something you're going to be doing a lot with an electric car, charging! I think Tesla (layout and text sizes aside) has really nailed this interface. Let's look at them side by side (charging at the same time, from two identical side by side chargers):

Let's break down all the things they show and can do:

I've found I've used almost all of these at some point during my charging journeys. Let's talk a bit about the ones the Polestar app is missing:

• Being able to see how fast the car is charging: you plugged into what you thought was a 12kW 3 phase AC charger and are only getting 4kW...maybe you need to try a different port or adjust something. Or if you're adjusting the charging rate, you can see the effect that has on the amount of kW the car is charging at. All of this info is available on the driver screen inside the car, but it would be handy to have in the app as well.
• Start and stop charging: I use this a lot at home when I'm charging off solar. I'll leave the car plugged in, and then when I see solar generation is really high and my home battery is full, I'll tap the start charging button. Ditto for stop charging.
• Unlock charge port: the Polestar has a dedicated button for this next to the charge port, so I don't particularly need or miss that function in the app. If anything this is a more sensible place to have this feature.
• Change the charging limit: it's a bit bizarre the app is missing this. What charge will I end up with? What if I set the limit wrong weeks ago and forgot?
• Notification when charging completes and when a fast charge is almost done: I've never seen either of these (and I don't think the Polestar app ever asked for notification permission) so I'm 97% sure they aren't there. These are really handy when you're at a public charger and need a prod for when it's time to come back and move your car.

Additionally it's nice the Polestar app allows you to set a charge rate limit (useful mainly for home charging) but it's slightly odd that unlike the Tesla app this isn't shown in context. If you have a 25A capable charger, nothing in the app shows you that while it's charging. The Tesla app does a better job of putting this in context, as when you dial it back you'll see something like "20A/25A" which is very useful. You can see the maximum is 25A, and that the car is currently charging at 20A. That kind of context would be really handy in the Polestar app as well. At the moment I can see a lot of people being confused by "Set Amperage Limit" with no other context about what that is or what it might be sensible to set it at.

Final Thoughts

The Polestar app needs work, however it's great that it exists. When it's working, being able to find your car, pre-heat or pre-cool it and lock and unlock it are all useful functions. If Polestar can make it connect more reliably that in itself would be a big win. I would really love them to expand and improve the charging screen though, as once you've had access to all the features the Tesla app has, it's hard to go back to something less capable. I suspect all this info is available (or can be made available) via the API, so I hope that's something that can come in a future app update.

A few weeks ago our family went all electric. My wife sold her 2018 VW Tiguan (for almost what we paid for it, the used car market in Australia is nuts at the moment!) and took delivery of a Polestar 2, long range, single motor in Magnesium. Having had electric cars for 4+ years now, we knew there'd be no issues with road trips or charging or anything most people ask or worry about, not to mention that we were both excited to never go to a petrol station again. As mentioned in my other posts, the solar and battery system at my house can also charge these cars for free quite easily for about 9 months of the year. For the other 3 (which we are currently in) my wife gets free charging at her work, where they have a GIANT solar installation. So it's renewable, guilt free...and also, well, free!

There are of course a million reviews out there for the Polestar 2. Zeus knows we watched a lot of them before buying one! But I'm not a car reviewer and don't want to bore you trying to become one, so here's some quick observations:

The delivery process in Adelaide was very smooth. The delivery person turned up at the agreed time to our place, and shortly after a truck arrived with the car on it. Sunny, our delivery person, was super friendly and very eager to show us all the bits of the car. So eager in fact that we just let him do his thing, it was a joy to behold.

Compared to my model 3, some things instantly stood out to me. To my eye, the Polestar 2 is just a nicer looking car inside and out. I prefer the lines, I prefer the more "car type" cabin. It also feels better built in a way that's hard to describe. More solid. Tighter tolerances. Just...well...better. It does however feel a bit more cramped because all those screens, consoles and padded areas cut down on the overall visibility. The centre console for example feels quite high and imposing. I guess it's a design feature, but it could have been a bit lower and more subdued. Driving the model 3 feels like you're in a fish tank. Driving the Polestar feels like...well..driving a car. I'd say overall the model 3 is nicer to sit in and admire, while the Polestar is more practical day to day to actually drive and be a passenger in.

Driving wise, both are very planted to the road thanks to their heavy battery packs. I don't really have a preference except to say they are both a joy to drive. I'm also not a car reviewer, so for this bit I'm quite happy to offload you to YouTube for their opinions. That said if you have the means (money, a place to charge it, etc) and haven't gone electric yet...well...you really should! There are a lot more options than there were a few years ago, and for this segment of the market the model 3 and Polestar 2 are my favourites.

Android Automotive (the infotainment system the Polestar runs) is functionally a bit better than Tesla's system. It's a bit uglier, but overall you can do more of what you need to get done as well as install third party apps like Pocket Casts, PlugShare and of course, Spotify. Having the ability to install apps from the Google Play store, straight into your car is very handy. The voice assistant is amazing. It can actually understand me properly, and lets you dictate text messages, navigate and change car settings with ease. The addition of a screen in the driver console section is nice as well. It shows you routing info while navigating, and also important things like speed, etc. It's not a big deal to glance over to my left in the model 3 to see that, but it's nicer to not have to. Why Google (or Polestar) went with the thin icon style design they did though...is a bit beyond me. I don't love that look, but functionality wise it's stellar.

Charging wise the Polestar 2 has the same Type 2 plug almost all cars in Australia have now. With the top bit for AC charging, and a set of DC pins for fast charging. One small pain point: you can charge a Polestar 2 from a gen 3 Tesla wall charger. Some early gen 2 ones also have an internal switch you can flick to do the same. But as you can guess, I had the gen 2 model which they made for about a year that is unable to charge anything that isn't a Tesla. It has the internal switch, but by all accounts it's non functional. So I had to pony up for a newer charger. On the plus side the cable is far thinner now and I also got to move it to a more convenient spot where we can charge both cars in the garage.

Finally, let's talk road trips. If you're new to electric cars my advice here is to take the "WLTP" number quoted on the car makers site, and shave off 20% for city driving, and 30% for highway (100km/h+ speeds). This will vary a bit based on how hard you drive, but it's a good conservative figure to give you an idea of "real world" range. So the model 3 long range claims 600kms, in reality you're going to get 480kms around the city and 420kms at highway speeds. Similarly the Polestar 2 claims 540kms which means 430kms city, 380kms highway. What that means in practice is that there's more than enough range for almost anyone. Sure you can't drive 8 hours non stop, but I'm not entirely sure you should ever do that for safety and comfort reasons. Drive for 2-3 hours, take a break, fast charge for 20 minutes, and keep going.

The elephant in the Australian room is that (at the time of writing this post) Tesla's Supercharging network is much more reliable than other third party systems. That's changing fast, and Tesla might even open their network up to other cars soon, but for the next year or two this will likely still be a fairly big factor in Tesla's favour Down Under. We still plan to road trip in the Polestar 2 (1200km+ trips) but it will require slightly more planning and slightly more vigilance before we leave to make sure all the stations are operational and we pick the correct route. Thankfully the early adopter portion of EV ownership, like planning wineries to stop at that have 3 phase power, is a distant memory. We're in the decent amount of chargers, occasional issues, portion of the adoption curve. I fully expect in 2 years here in Australia those issues will be behind us, so there really has never been a better time to buy an EV...if you can find one shipping here this year. That lack of availability and the price of EVs are two massive issues here in 2022, but that's a whole other blog post.

Firstly a thread about going downhill: [this used to be a link to Twitter, but now it’s gone].

Then about the thing people ask about most, charging: [this used to be a link to Twitter, but now it’s gone].

That said I feel like I have to give the people actually reading my blog something a bit extra, so here's a recent picture I took of my car in the Adelaide Hills. What's that? You don't care? How dare you!