Polestar

Polestar is registered with NHTSA as a vehicle manufacturer and carries 791 consumer safety complaints across 2 nameplates in the Office of Defects Investigation public database. The brand has been the subject of 13 safety recalls and is currently tied to 1 active or historical federal investigation, of which 1 remain open and under review. Every one of those figures is pulled directly from NHTSA's published datasets, not from owner forums, manufacturer marketing, or third-party reliability surveys, so the numbers you see reflect the same data federal regulators use when they decide whether to escalate a preliminary evaluation into an engineering analysis or a formal defect order.

Model-level volume varies widely inside any automaker's portfolio: best-sellers accumulate complaints simply because more vehicles are on the road, while limited-run trims and discontinued nameplates often carry disproportionately high complaint rates per unit sold. Inside Polestar's lineup, the single highest complaint count sits with the Polestar 2 (684 filings, model years 2021–2025), followed by Polestar 3. Use the table below to compare nameplate-by-nameplate counts, then drill into a specific model to see which components dominate and which model years concentrate the crash, fire, and fatality reports.

Active NHTSA investigations involving Polestar are the most forward-looking signal on this page, they precede recalls and typically focus on a specific component family or model-year cohort. Recall status, by contrast, is backward-looking: it tells you what the manufacturer has already been compelled to remedy, not what they are being asked to remedy next. Together, complaints, investigations, and recalls form the three-layer early-warning system federal safety regulators have relied on since the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act of 1966.