Polestar maintenance: cost, plans and service schedule

Are Polestars expensive to maintain?

No, Polestars are not expensive to maintain.

In fact, your first three years of routine maintenance are free. Per Polestar itself, “Every Polestar 2 comes with free, scheduled maintenance for the first 3 years after delivery, or 30,000 miles, whichever comes first.”

Three years/30,000 miles of free maintenance certainly sounds like a lot. And in the gas-powered car world, it really is, especially when you’re getting $100 oil changes every 5,000 miles.

The funny thing is, in EV world — specifically planet Polestar — three years/30,000 miles only translates to one free visit.

“Polestars have scheduled maintenance every two years or 20,000 miles,” our local Polestar service advisor told us. “So your first two-year/20K visit is on Polestar.”

The two-year/20,000-mile service itself is also pretty simple. “It includes an inspection, new wiper blades, a cleaning and a cabin air filter, as well as pickup and delivery.”

We have to hand it to Polestar’s marketing department for dressing up $30 wiper blades and a $20 cabin air filter as “three years of complimentary maintenance.” But hey, free is free.

Once you redeem your free scheduled maintenance visit at year two/20,000 miles, the next visit at year four/40,000 miles will be on you.

“The 40,000-mile visit is the same as the 20,000-mile visit,” the service advisor told us. “Wiper blades, cabin air filter, cleaning, pickup and delivery. And I believe the cost is $260.”

While $260 isn’t bad for all the parts and labor included, especially since it includes delivery of a loaner vehicle, you can probably save over $100 by performing the routine maintenance yourself.

You can find Polestar 2-compatible cabin air filters on Amazon for around $20, and there are numerous video tutorials on YouTube for how to replace them.

Polestar maintenance cost and schedule

To recap, the Polestar maintenance schedule is just a cleaning, new wiper blades and a fresh cabin air filter every 20,000 miles. The first visit is free, while the rest are $260, and if you’re even slightly mechanically inclined, you can probably save yourself $100-plus by performing visit No. 2 and No. 3 yourself. Still, maintaining a Polestar is cheaper than average car maintenance costs.

So how does nearly free maintenance compare with rival EV makers?

How Polestar compares to other automakers

Right off the bat, maintaining a Polestar (or any of its EV rivals) is almost certainly way cheaper than maintaining its gas-powered equivalent.

We added Volvo to the chart to highlight the contrast. When there’s no oil, spark plugs or engine air filters involved, the average cost of annual maintenance plummets from $1,000-plus to $300 or less.

As for the EVs themselves, Polestar has a cheaper maintenance schedule than Rivian since the latter requires $180 inspections every 7,500 miles. Tesla does not have a routine maintenance schedule, but owners still have to replace their own wiper blades and cabin air filters. Polestar offers your first round for free, giving them a slight lead.

Finally, Lucid’s routine service schedule calls for annual visits instead of semi-annual, so you’ll get two free visits from your two years of complimentary maintenance.

Lucid’s annual service visits are also far more comprehensive since they include a comprehensive inspection, brake pad/rotor/fluid inspection, wiper blades, key fob batteries, sun visor batteries, cabin air filters and tire rotations.

On that note, it’s worth pointing out that Polestar and Tesla have a totally different approach to routine maintenance compared to Lucid and Rivian. The former two take a more reactive approach, performing the bare minimum to keep the car on the road (wiper blades and cabin air filters) until something goes wrong.

Lucid and Rivian, by contrast, take a more proactive approach by performing rigorous multipoint inspections every year, regardless of whether there’s an issue. This more preventive approach may cost you more as the owner, but they may provide valuable peace of mind in return.

Just something to keep in mind if you’re shopping for a luxury EV.

Polestar maintenance and repair costs by model

Since Polestar really only has one vehicle for sale at the moment (the Polestar 2), there’s not much of a comparison to be made. The Polestar 1 was a low-volume halo car with only 1,500 units produced, while the Polestar 3 SUV has just begun arriving in showrooms in summer 2024.

So for now, that leaves us with the Polestar 2. Is it a trusty, reliable workhorse? Or a flashy money pit?

Polestar repair costs

Even with the Polestar 2, it’s hard to gauge average repair costs since the vehicle is still so new.

For context, all new Polestars come with the following factory warranty:

• Four years/50,000 miles of bumper-to-bumper coverage
• Eight years/100,000 miles of EV battery coverage.

And since the Polestar 2 came out in 2021, virtually all of them are still under their factory comprehensive warranty. As a result, we simply haven’t had a taste of what Polestars may cost to repair once their factory coverage runs out.

That being said, we do have some idea of what Volvos and Teslas cost to repair out of warranty, and it’s reasonable to assume that Polestar may fall somewhere in that range.

Adjusted for inflation, RepairPal pins the average annual maintenance and repair costs of Volvos and Teslas to around $1,052 and $1,138, respectively, so you may want to budget a similar amount for your aging Polestar.

» LEARN: What is a manufacturer’s warranty?

How can an extended warranty help?

When facing four-digit repair costs, it often makes sense to invest in an extended auto warranty.

At an average cost of $1,000 per year of coverage, extended auto warranties can often pay for themselves after covering just one repair bill. On top of that, many warranty holders find that they provide invaluable peace of mind, even when you’re not using them — it’s one of the many pros of extended auto warranties.

Unfortunately, the extended car warranty companies tend to shy away from niche or electric vehicles, and Polestar is both. Neither Endurance nor olive was able to provide us with a quote on a Polestar 2, and we doubt the rest will, either.

As a result, your options for a Polestar extended warranty may be short at the moment. But you can always buy a certified pre-owned Polestar, which comes with two additional years of bumper-to-bumper coverage backed by Polestar itself.

» MORE: Car warranty vs. car insurance