1000 Miglia Green 2019

Design and performance are two sides of the same coin. Car design doesn’t just follow the Rule of Cool*; every design feature, no matter how aesthetically pleasing, exists to improve the car’s performance. This is gospel to Polestar. We’ll state it again for the record: everything on a Polestar is there for a reason. Performance is never sacrificed for design, nor the opposite. They’re the yin and the yang, the alpha and the omega, and we push the boundaries of both.

Back view of a white Polestar 1 at 1000 Miglia.

The Italian car industry shares the same values. Names like Pininfarina and Bertone put the Mediterranean nation on the map when it came to automotive design. Accordingly, they arranged the 1000 Miglia. Called “the most beautiful race in the world”, the 1000 Miglia has been a platform for design and performance innovation for more than 90 years. Winding a loop from Brescia through the capital and back, the 1000 Miglia served as a guiding star for the automotive industry.

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This year saw the first iteration of the 1000 Miglia Green, a version of the race for electric and hybrid vehicles. Serving as both an homage to and a reimagining of the original race, a line-up of electric and hybrid vehicles (both modern and vintage) left Brescia on September 27th and arrived in Lainate on September 29th.

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And to definitively prove that design and performance elevate each other, Polestar Head of Design Max Missoni and AutoBild Editor Stefan Voswinkel took the Polestar 1 to a 2nd place finish in the hybrid category (7th place overall).

*It’s there because it looks cool.

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