Jay Leno, King of Gas Cars, Spends a Day Thrashing an Electric SUV - and Loves It

Jay Leno’s garage is a shrine to internal combustion. Muscle cars, steam-powered oddities, V8 monsters, motorcycles, if it burns fuel, he probably owns it. So when the host of Jay Leno’s Garage climbed behind the wheel of an electric Polestar 4 Arctic Circle prototype and took it bouncing down dusty California backroads, it raised more than a few eyebrows.

Even stranger? He was grinning the whole time.

The Polestar 4 Arctic Circle isn’t your neighbor’s quiet crossover. 7-second sprint to 60 mph, but the Swedish automaker turned it into a rally-bred engineering experiment. They swapped in adjustable Öhlins dampers, raised the suspension, fitted 20-inch OZ Racing wheels, Brembo brakes, Recaro seats, and rally lights.

The party piece is a custom hydraulic handbrake that disconnects the rear motor before engaging, letting drivers slide the car like a World Rally Championship machine. Polestar’s head of performance, Joakim Rydholm, spent weeks tuning the system to feel natural.

Leno started the day cautious, but once Rydholm told him to just floor it, the car came alive. Dust flew, the silent SUV carved corners, and Leno admitted the vehicle felt planted and confidence-inspiring. Rydholm explained that thousands of hours of testing on frozen Swedish lakes went into calibrating torque delivery through steering angle, throttle, and yaw sensors.

He went so far as to claim electric cars are already faster on ice than combustion vehicles, though without a dedicated rally series, there’s no official way to prove it. For a man who’s spent decades celebrating roaring engines, watching Jay Leno laugh his way through dirt roads in complete silence, throwing rooster tails of dust instead of exhaust smoke, is the most unexpected kind of fun.