What separates games from other forms of media is the control they give the player. Because the player has to perform the actions themselves, these games can make difficult subjects feel less distant than they would in other mediums.

These particular games are built on choice-based frameworks that resemble the lived reality of facing antagonistic systems and finding community in the margins. By relying on player agency and interactive mechanics, these five indie games overcome emotional barriers, inviting players to actively construct their own sense of meaning around mortality, grief, isolation, and political freedom.

[Editor's note: This article contains story spoilers for each of the games in the list.]

Inherited trauma & grief in What Remains of Edith Finch

Where to play: iOS, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Windows, Xbox

Content warning: This section includes descriptions of death, suicide, infanticide, and familial abuse.

Every Finch member has died differently, but they live forever through the family curse preserved in Giant Sparrow’s What Remains of Edith Finch. It’s an interactive anthology of 13 stories that follow Edith, after her mother’s death, to her abandoned and allegedly cursed ancestral home in hopes of finding out why she is the last living Finch descendant.

Each chronological chapter raises the question of whether the mythical Finch “curse” is real or an intergenerational cycle of severe neglect, as you discover that every tragedy may have been entirely avoidable.

The 1947 cycle begins with 10-year-old Molly, who contracts fatal food poisoning after eating toxic toothpaste and berries by her bedroom window. This illness triggers a series of hallucinations where the player controls various predatory animals eating prey, mirroring Molly's desperate hunger as she passes away. The neglect accelerates in 1957 with her twin, Calvin. Forward and backward inputs operate a cliffside swing set with no parental supervision, forcing the player to build up to the moment where Calvin slips off, launching the child’s body into the abyss.

In 1960, 16-year-old Barbara was left home alone, transforming a brutal home invasion into a playable horror comic book. And the peak of negligence arrives in 1977 with baby Gregory; splashing with bath toys while unsupervised, he turns the faucet on and fills the tub to the brim, drowning himself.

The devastating, fan-favorite story takes place in 2010 with Lewis. Crushed by his family’s generational curse, Lewis suffers from severe clinical depression and maladaptive daydreaming, a form of psychological dissociation where he creates a fantasy world to escape his unbearable reality. This chapter resonates so deeply with players because it forces them to actively participate in his mental trauma through a “split-brain” gameplay layout.

Mechanically, your right hand mindlessly mimics Lewis’ repetitive factory work: grabbing a fish, dragging it to a blade, and chopping off its head on a conveyor belt. Simultaneously, your left hand navigates a maze in Lewis’ mind. As his imagination consumes him, the maze screen physically expands, growing from a tiny thought bubble to one that completely swallows the bleak fish cannery. It is a hauntingly accurate simulation of a mind splitting in two, operating a blade on autopilot while the soul drifts entirely away. Creative director Ian Dallas famously highlighted this scene in his 2018 GDC presentation to show how mechanical multitasking can mirror profound psychological trauma.

On December 4, 2010, exactly two weeks after Lewis’ suicide, Dawn catches Edie feeding the family’s lore to young Edith and shouts, “My children are dead because of your stories!” This interaction exposes the toxic cycle of mythologizing the Finch deaths; the family transformed Edie’s negligence and Dawn’s denial into an inescapable fate. By framing these preventable tragedies as a curse, the Finch adults avoid accountability.

The last story pulls the player into an abstract, first-person birth canal, only to deliver a devastating twist: Edith died in childbirth, and the true narrator is her surviving teenage son, Christopher, standing over her grave. This can be read as presenting Edith’s death as another consequence of the family’s failure to act as an adequate support system.

What Remains of Edith Finch exploits a core gaming paradox: it grants the player absolute mechanical control while stripping away all narrative agency. In most games, player input implies the power to intervene, fix a problem, or change the outcome. Edith Finch deliberately weaponizes this expectation. By locking the player into bleak, unalterable loops, the game transforms agency into a tool of emotional confrontation, forcing us to reexamine how we process grief, memory, and personal accountability.

This total inability to intervene shifts the game from a passive narrative about a family curse into an active simulation of powerlessness. Because you must conduct the final actions of these dying characters, you are denied the comfort of a detached viewer. You become an involuntary accomplice to an intergenerational cycle of neglect. This structural design forces you to confront the sobering reality of mistakes, parental absenteeism, and the toxic stories families construct to avoid accountability. Ultimately, playing What Remains of Edith Finch will teach you that no amount of altering the finality of death or rewriting our inherited history will help; we must find the courage to break the destructive narratives that keep us trapped in the past.

Outer Wilds reveals how cosmic dread is actually freedom

Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Windows, Xbox

The first 20 minutes of Outer Wilds feel deceptively ordinary, even boring. You step into the hiking boots of a young alien astronaut, roast marshmallows with other creature travelers, and launch a handmade wooden spacecraft, expecting a slow and cozy adventure about space exploration. Then, the sun erupts into a supernova. Everything you’ve experienced in the last 22 minutes vanishes in a blinding flash, and you’re sitting back at the same campfire as if nothing happened.

Your first death fundamentally changes how Outer Wilds teaches you to think. There are no experience points, weapon upgrades, or permanent equipment. The only thing that survives each loop is what you’ve learned from the last, gradually revealing why the sun is dying and what the long-extinct Nomai were trying to accomplish.

The ultimate objective is to locate the coordinates of the “Eye of the Universe,” a highly volatile quantum anomaly that predates the cosmos. By removing traditional milestones, the design isolates the player within an indifferent astrophysics simulation.

Space emphasizes human limitations in environments where survival is fundamentally discouraged. Creative director Alex Beachum highlighted this tension in a 2015 interview, stating that he was fascinated by how humans “strap themselves to giant rockets just to explore an environment where they clearly aren’t supposed to be.” The oxygen gauge and fuel meters function as fragile boundaries against a domain that does not care about the protagonist’s survival.

In this solar system, time is an active hazard that physically destroys the environment, meaning the player cannot pause these processes, and discovering the Eye requires working within a crumbling timeline. The player gradually goes from feeling in control of the ship to realizing that some things in the game simply cannot be controlled. This design isolates human limitation against cosmic indifference, exposing the many boundaries of our survival.

In typical sci-fi games, the goal is to defuse the bomb, defeat the alien threat, and save the galaxy. In Outer Wilds, as the player translates ancient text logs across the system, they discover a devastating cosmic truth: the sun is not exploding because of a broken machine or a villain’s plot, but because it has simply reached the natural, unpreventable end of its life cycle. This structural framework forces a radical shift from an alien quest for dominance to an inner journey of philosophical reconciliation with the self.

This illusion of agency is precisely how Outer Wilds will reshape your perspective on reality. Instead of a rescue mission, reaching the Eye of the Universe is simply about understanding. The loop is not a puzzle to be solved to save the current solar system, but a window of time to be accepted. When you finally reach the Eye of the Universe, you do not stop the end of everything; you realize that the birth of a new universe has been triggered at the cost of your own life. The travelers you met die in the solar system’s supernova once the loop breaks.

The final scene shows all the travelers gathered around the final campfire as quantum manifestations born of your own memories. Everyone sings one last folk song and realizes that the connections and memories you make matter most in life, and true peace comes from accepting that things must end so that new and beautiful things can begin. You no longer feel existential dread but rather practice the active acceptance of impermanence.

For the player, this transitions from a virtual simulation into a lasting psychological lesson of reality. In a modern world driven by the exhausting pursuit of permanent control, endless legacy, and hustle culture, the game leaves us with a profound truth: “The universe is, and we are.” It teaches us to release the hopeless burden of trying to fix uncontrollable events or outrun our own mortality. By forcing us to sit with the inevitability of the end, Outer Wilds pushes us to find authentic meaning in the radical act of curiosity, shared presence, and the care we extend to others in the brief moments we are here.

Firewatch is toxic escapism

Where to play: Linux, Mac, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation, Windows, Xbox

Henry spends the entire summer talking to a coworker he never actually sees. He accepts a fire lookout job to escape the emotional devastation of his wife Julia’s early-onset Alzheimer’s disease. Delilah is the only meaningful human connection he has but she exists as a voice crackling through a handheld radio. This relationship in Firewatch feels intimate because it depends almost entirely on what the player chooses to say (or not say).

That intimacy is possible because, rather than allowing unlimited dialogue, many responses disappear if the player hesitates for too long, requiring an immediate decision between speaking honestly, masking discomfort with humor, or remaining silent.

Choosing silence carries its own consequences, often creating awkward pauses that breed uncertainty and mistrust. This choice design reflects the anxiety of unsaid vulnerability, where silence is just as heavy as an admission of guilt.

By trapping the player inside a relationship built entirely through communication, Firewatch reframes isolation as something emotional rather than physical. In traditional media, retreating to nature is often a therapeutic journey that offers clarity. Firewatch uses its dialogue mechanics to expose this idea as toxic escapism. The player quickly realizes that Henry isn’t wandering the Wyoming wilderness out of curiosity; he is hiding in it. The game’s writing team emphasizes this friction by ensuring that every conversation with Delilah can either build a fragile bond or spiral into defensive paranoia.

By confining us in a loop of communication with an invisible partner, the game forces an uncomfortable perspective: the vast wilderness eventually feels just as trapping as a sealed room. Gamers who have ever turned to games as a temporary escape from personal troubles will notice that Firewatch reveals the line between reality and escape. It can imply that physical distance cannot outrun internal trauma, and that true resolution requires returning to the very vulnerabilities we try to avoid.

You can only win in Road 96 through collective resistance

Where to play: Nintendo Switch, PC, PlayStation, Xbox

Road 96 politically critiques the “Great Man” theory, which supposes that most games about revolution revolve around a single great hero. DigixArt’s Road 96 distributes agency across a rotating cast of anonymous and vulnerable teenage hitchhikers attempting to flee the authoritarian nation of Petria. By making every protagonist completely replaceable, the game offers no illusion of individual heroism. Some teens escape, some are arrested, and a few even die before reaching the border.

The objective is to learn whether a single person can resolve a systemic political crisis or if true liberation implies a collective process. The game enforces this philosophy through a travel system that serves as a simulation of systemic hostility. The main mechanical element depends on how you choose to travel. Hitchhiking may introduce a helpful stranger or a dangerous criminal. Walking conserves money but drains stamina. Stealing a car gets you farther, but dramatically increases your chances of being arrested. When a protagonist dies or escapes, the game does not reset; you step into the shoes of a brand-new teenager who must navigate the socio-political fallout left behind by the former teen.

The player is forced to ask themselves an ethical question: are my immediate choices making the path toward freedom easier or harder for the strangers who will inherit this road after I am gone? Creative director Yoan Fanise noted in a 2021 interview about the game that the “team wanted to find a structure that would not be classical branching, something that is truly unique for each player.” The result is a narrative in which no single playthrough can resolve the entire political crisis. Every journey offers only one perspective on Petria’s collapsing society.

By constantly replacing the protagonist, Road 96 refuses to let us imagine that meaningful political change can be achieved by a single exceptional individual. Each successful escape is only temporary and the regime remains. We live in a culture that loves stories about the chosen one fixing everything overnight. Road 96 reminds you that real-world change is a group effort and your individual survival is always tied to the well-being of the community around you.

In the real world, facing systemic barriers like institutional discrimination, economic inequality, or political animosity can feel completely paralyzing. It is easy to look at massive, broken systems and conclude that individual efforts are meaningless. Road 96 visually and mechanically rejects this despair. By mirroring these exact margins of society, the game serves as an interactive reminder that those who are pushed to the edges are not powerless.

Once you’ve successfully led these teens across the borders, you’re left with a different view on activism. These convictions reframe how you measure your own impact in the world. Small acts of courage such as speaking up against an unfair policy, sharing resources with someone in need, or simply surviving a hostile environment, is each step closer to freedom. Instead of judging your success by whether or not you alone defeated a corrupt system, your perspective shifts toward the value of micro-resistance.

Ultimately, the game encourages you to realize that you are part of a continuous human chain. You may not live to see the complete end of an oppressive system, but by making one small choice to ease someone else’s burden today, you are actively making the road safer for the generation walking right behind you. It shifts the definition of a meaningful life from achieving unconditional victory to sustaining a collective legacy of humanity, care and resilience.

Tides of Tomorrow relies on ecological responsibility

Where to play: PlayStation, Windows, Xbox

Most adventure games focus on the kind of protagonist a player wants to become. DigixArt’s Tides of Tomorrow takes a different approach by focusing instead on the consequences players leave behind. You play as a Tidewalker, a plastic-infested ocean nomad navigating a flooded, post-apocalyptic planet called Elynd. As you move through this world, your choices actively dictate not just your own journey, but the physical environment that future players will inherit.

The game’s most innovative feature is its asynchronous multiplayer storytelling system. Rather than having every player experience the same static version of Elynd, the game forces you to encounter the real-world ecological aftermath of decisions made by people who played before you. For example, a previous player might drain a reservoir of clean water, dump toxic waste, or resort to violence during a resource crisis, leaving a damaged environment behind. The next player is then forced to survive within those ruined conditions. Game director Adrien Poncet has described this dynamic as the core tension of the game: players are not only accountable for their own morality, but must also adapt to the chaotic choices of strangers.

Instead of simply witnessing a broken ecosystem, players experience the direct guilt of helping create one. At the start of the game, you are greeted by peaceful, welcoming expanses of the ocean. However, as the destructive reality of past players manifests around you, that initial sense of comfort gradually disappears. There are no traditional metrics like high scores or ranked achievements as the game continues based on community impact. Preserving resources is no longer about proving you are the “best” player; it becomes a test of empathy regarding what another human being will inherit from your choices. In the real world, people are often disproportionately harmed by pollution, resource exploitation, and environmental damage, even when they played no part in causing it. Tides of Tomorrow represents this imbalance by framing ecological responsibility as a shared human burden rather than a job for one. Eventually, it asks a far more difficult question: are you willing to leave the next person with a world that is slightly better than the one you were given?

In our modern consumer culture, we tend to focus on convenience, personal comfort, and immediate gratification. We overuse plastic and exhaust resources with the unconscious assumption that the consequences vanish once out of sight. Tides of Tomorrow forces you to realize that there is no place far away. Everything we discard or exploit simply becomes a crisis for someone else to inherit. When you step back into reality, this realization transforms from a game mechanic into a permanent moral compass for how you treat your environment. You stop seeing yourself as an isolated consumer and experiencing the game rewires your daily habits to see the natural world with a heightened sense of generational awareness. Before you make an unnecessary purchase, overuse a resource, or wrongfully dispose of waste, you find yourself asking the exact same question the game poses: who is going to inherit this choice? It turns ordinary acts of conservation into radical acts of empathy for people you will never meet. The game effectively guides you toward authentic ethical stewardship, proving that the truest sign of a successful life is leaving behind a much kinder world.

Players frequently look to video games as a simple escape from reality. However, the true purpose of these five games is to return players to the real world with a fundamentally different understanding of their place within it. Whether you are carrying a family’s heavy history, accepting the natural end of a universe, confronting personal grief, fighting for collective freedom, or protecting a future you will never live to see, you are left with a sobering reminder: your choices matter, even when you cannot control or witness the final outcome.

Waymo has sharply increased its lobbying spending as it seeks to persuade US regulators to clear a path for fully autonomous taxi services, intensifying its battle with rival Uber over the future of robotaxis.

The Alphabet-owned company spent more than $1 million between April and June on lobbying the federal government, more than double its outlay a year earlier, according to filings. That put Waymo’s spending close to Uber’s and well ahead of rivals including Amazon’s Zoox and Tesla.

The rise in lobbying comes as Waymo and Uber push competing visions for the future of ride-hailing. Waymo wants a faster route to fully driverless commercial services, while Uber is advocating a staggered rollout in which robotaxis operate alongside human drivers.

Their diverging legislative strategies have contributed to their relationship souring. The FT reported last month that Waymo was exploring options to exit its Uber partnership in Austin and Atlanta, where the ride-hailing group operates its services.

“They’ve both stepped up lobbying and are pushing up against each other, which now appears to be hastening their divorce,” said Walter Piecyk, an analyst at LightShed Partners.

Both companies are lobbying aggressively in several US states and Washington, DC, after pushback stalled their expansion to markets including New York and Chicago, as politicians and labour groups warn the technology could displace drivers and undercut existing services.

In the first six months of 2026, Waymo increased its spending by 93 percent from the year before to slightly more than $2 million. It has called for a federal framework to ease the rollout of robotaxis. In May, it hired law firm Greenberg Traurig to lobby on its behalf, adding to a roster of several other Washington firms. Credit: Federal lobbying disclosures

At the local level, the robotaxi operator has outspent both Uber and Zoox in lobbying legislators in the District of Columbia. It has pressed local regulators to allow robotaxi services in the nation’s capital, including by inviting residents earlier this year to write in support of its rollout.

In New York state, Waymo has spent more than half a million dollars so far this year—more than double Uber’s lobbying spend—as it seeks a foothold in one of the largest taxi markets.

Its lobbying in the state intensified after Governor Kathy Hochul earlier this year walked back proposals that would have allowed autonomous vehicle companies to run services across most of the state.

Waymo offered to set up a $20 million fund to support drivers affected by the technology’s deployment, according to people familiar with the matter.

In New Jersey, it has engaged lawmakers who are exploring a three-year pilot program to test deployments.

Waymo said in a statement that it was advocating for the rollout of autonomous vehicles and was not pursuing measures that would limit competitors or “prescribe” how the technology was deployed.

Uber, meanwhile, has been racing to make up lost ground in AVs after abandoning its in-house self-driving effort in 2020, committing more than $10 billion over the past year through equity stakes and robotaxi fleet agreements.

The ride-hailing group has warned several Democratic-led states against a carte blanche rollout and has instead lobbied for so-called hybrid networks that route rides to both human drivers and autonomous vehicles.

In New Jersey, Uber lobbyists have proposed that any platform offering robotaxi services also use human drivers for at least 85 percent of all rides during a three-year pilot program.

Critics have accused Uber of seeking regulatory capture by attempting to keep rides flowing through its platform as it grapples with rising competition.

Uber has said it is false that they were “anti-AV or seeking to slow AV deployment.” It said hybrid networks “get the technology to consumers sooner while giving policymakers a practical framework to manage the transition.”

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Comments

My comment on There's No Limit to How Bad Code Can Get — Lobste.rs.

[In reply to a comment about burning it down to start from scratch when technical debt becomes overwhelming]

In my experience it's so rare for that to work.

You announce the old thing is irrecoverably drowning in tech debt. You spin up a team to rewrite it from scratch. Work begins.

Meanwhile the old thing remains a moving target: it's running the core business, so changes are still necessary. The developers working on it know that it's going to be made obsolete by the new thing soon, so they don't have any incentive to go beyond the smallest effort possible to add the new features. Technical debt continues to mount.

Meanwhile, the team working on the new thing are ambitious and probably a little naive. They start out at a great pace - it's greenfield after all - but as time progresses it becomes apparent that nobody fully understands the behavior and scope of the thing they are replacing. If it was well documented and tested it wouldn't need to be replaced, after all...

After months (or even years) without delivering value, the pressure is on to "ship it", so the new system is launched to handle a subset of what the old system handled - or often for some new feature that was too hard to build with the now mostly unmaintained old system.

... so now you have TWO systems in production - the janky old system that nobody wants to touch, and a new system which handles just a few production features and is 80% inactive code that is meant to replace the old system, eventually.

If you're really lucky the company won't have lost patience with the new system and will allow that work to continue. The longer this all takes, and the longer the old system stays in production and stubbornly continues to work, the higher the risk that "priorities have changed" and the new system total replacement work is abandoned, leaving you with two systems where you used to have one.

The best article I've read about completing this process responsibly is Migrations: the sole scalable fix to tech debt by Will Larson.

If I run into a situation like this in the future, my strong recommendation will be to shore up the old system with as much automated testing as possible and then seeing if targeted refactors can get it to the desired shape. My hunch is that in many cases that will have a much higher chance of success than the siren call of a greenfield replacement.

Tags: migrations, technical-debt

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It’s been known for some time that used EVs depreciate like a Dodo bird BASE jumping. Polestar’s current legal situation, combined with the economics of the used EV market, have made its best-selling model, the Polestar 2, an incredible value. Despite having an original starting price of nearly $60k at launch, at the time of this writing there are over 40 pre-owned Polestar 2s listed in the United States with an asking price under $20k. I bought one, and I have to tell you about it.

While yours truly may not have the most sensible record of buying used cars (I do after all own a V12 Jaguar and a 325k-mile Land Rover), I still think these Polestar 2s are an incredible value. So much so, I put my money where my mouth is and purchased a 60k mile, 469hp, Long Range Dual Motor model for just $14,200. While current pricing is certainly eye-brow raising, the real question is: Should you trust a used, high-tech, electric fastback from a defunct brand more than you can trust lettuce from Taco Bell?

The Polestar 2 Is A Ridiculous Amount Of Car For Relatively Little Money

Launched in 2020 for the 2021 model year, the Polestar 2 was Polestar’s first fully electric vehicle. Originally debuted in 2016 as the Volvo 40.2 concept, the vehicle was the product of Polestar’s design team taking the classic ne’er-do-well high school essay writing technique of Ctrl C + Ctrl V, making a few minor tweaks, and voila! The Polestar 2 was born. Riding on the CMA platform – shared with the Volvo XC40 and C40 – the Polestar 2 was available in three different configurations: two different single motor configurations, bewilderingly in either front or rear wheel drive (yes, they switched in 2024 from front to rear!), and as a dual motor AWD variant. With battery pack options of 78 and 82 kWh, the Polestar 2 boasts a thoroughly okay EPA estimated range of anywhere between 247 and 320 miles depending on configuration.

When new, the Polestar 2 wasn’t exactly a stellar value proposition, especially compared to its primary competition: the Tesla Model 3. However, much like lutefisk, certain Nordic delicacies only get better with age. Originally, Polestar 2s ranged in price anywhere between $46k and $60k depending on motor and trim. According to transaction data from Cox Automotive, average retail sale prices for 4-year-old Polestar 2s currently range from the high teens to low twenties, and at those prices, this Swedish by way of China liftback, becomes a much more attractive option. Especially once you consider that, through the modern convenience of over-the-air updates, Polestar 2s now have additional features, like Tesla supercharger compatibility; that didn’t exist when these vehicles rolled off the Polestar “Space” floor.

While most Polestar 2s you’ll find at dealers are hovering in the low twenties, with a little bit of hunting you can find them for even less. Thanks to the magic of EV depreciation, and some Ed Bolian-style shrewd negotiation, you can now pick up a Polestar 2 for less than the price of a Fiat Topolino. As I mentioned before, I myself took the plunge on a privately owned (read: not Uber driven), clean title 2022 Long Range Dual Motor example for just $14,200 in February of this year. With the demise of the brand in the US, it’s become even easier to find deals like mine in the low to mid teens. Considering what you’re getting for the money, I think they’re an absolute slam dunk.

Though the Polestar brand is young, with its Volvo-adjacent styling and architecture, the Polestar 2 feels like a car designed by a car company with a proven track record of building cars. Combined with the utility of its fastback shape and ride and handling characteristics befitting of actually having had a chassis development team, the Polestar 2 has become an even more attractive, yet practical alternative to its Tesla competition.

But First, Batteries

As a car salesman who works with many first-time electric car buyers, one of the first questions I’m asked typically involves the subject of battery health. Interestingly, as traditional Volvo lore would imply, the Polestar 2’s pack is actually quite robust. In particular, the 78kWh CATL manufactured pack in the Long Range Dual Motor example stands out as one of the most durable EV batteries past 100k kilometers according to a study conducted by Swedish online EV Marketplace, Carla.

Additionally, my local Polestar Service Center in San Diego, CA claims to have seen examples used as Ubers in excess of 250k miles still reporting battery state of health readings around the 80% mark. The Polestar 2 proves that, unlike our smartphones, modern EV batteries don’t degrade at the rate we are used to with other consumer electronics.

What To Look Out For

Much like the menu at In-N-Out, the Polestar 2 range is a fairly simplistic affair. There are just two motor variations, single and dual, and all available option packages: Plus, Pilot, and Performance (with exception for the Performance package) are available on either. There is no option for “Animal Style”, but there is a Nappa Leather package with ventilated seats that you can select on top of the Plus Package.

Rather than bore you with the word by word accounting of option package features, we’ve cooked up the following menu to help you decide:

Off the bat, it’s best to avoid the 2021-2023 FWD Single Motor cars. According to my local Polestar Service Center, they seem to have a tendency to munch on front motors. However, the EFAD (Electronic Front Differential) and ERAD (Electronic Rear Differential) used in the RWD Single Motor and Dual Motor models are considerably more reliable and have few documented failures.

By far the most common issue with Polestar 2s is the infamous “Wheel of Fortune” noise emanating from the rear axles under regenerative braking. This well-known clicking coming from the CVs has been well documented by the Polestar 2 community and is indicative of the beginnings of axle failure. I’ve been assured by my local Polestar Service Center that this is a fairly common issue and that – if you don’t mind bystanders suddenly darting their heads in search of Vanna White every time you go past – you can just turn up the radio and ignore it for quite a while. Nice. Fixing the issue requires replacement of both rear axles. Fortunately, this part is shared with the Volvo XC40 and C40 Recharge and an upgraded part number is readily available.

At 4,750lbs, the Polestar 2 isn’t the lightest vehicle around. Subsequently, suspension components shared with the gas-engined XC40 can take quite a beating. Front strut mounts in particular have a tendency to fail leading to creaking and knocking noises from the front end. While the noise may sound severe, it’s a fairly common issue for most Volvo platforms dating back to the 850. Thankfully, parts are readily available from a number of suppliers and practically any shop familiar with wrenching on Volvos can silence those uncouth noises from your front end in an afternoon.

Beyond axles and strut mounts, there’s little else you have to be on the look out for when inspecting a Polestar 2, but there are a few more points you should consider when looking at potential candidates. While the Performance package may be tempting with its Ohlins dampers and Brembo brakes, it’s important to note that replacements can be costly. Brake rotors ring in at over $260 a corner and the Ohlins struts come to an eyewatering $2700 a piece! Fortunately, if the horsepower upgrade from 408hp to 476hp is an absolute must, and you can make do without the Ohlins and Brembos, it can be downloaded to any Long Range Dual Motor Polestar 2 through Polestar’s online marketplace.

Lastly, like with any used car purchase, reviewing a Polestar’s maintenance history is recommended. That being said, don’t be surprised if there isn’t much. Unlike an Internal Combustion Engine (ICE) car, sparse records are not necessarily indicative of a lack of care. For instance, when I bought my Polestar 2, it had only three CarFax entries in 60k miles, and one warranty receipt for a replacement charging cable. Simply put, with how little maintenance EVs require, don’t be alarmed if you only have a few receipts to review.

Where Can I Service it?

I have referred to my local Polestar Service Center throughout this, and you might be thinking: If Polestar is pulling out of the US market, where will I be able to service mine when they’re gone for good? Polestar has announced that they will be maintaining their network of 32 service centers in the US for existing vehicle owners and will continue to honor any warranty work. While the manager of my local Polestar Service Center assures me that everything is business as usual behind the scenes, I can’t help but think what the manufacturer’s support is going to look like once warranties start expiring on current cars. I have my doubts.

As someone who generally likes to have a contingency plan in place, I’m happy to report that independent Polestar servicing is far easier to find than you’d expect! During my research leading up to the purchase of my Polestar 2, I found a number of EV independents close to me in Southern California willing to work on Polestars. Thanks to commonality with the Volvo XC40 and C40, even my long-time, local Volvo mechanic has started working on out of warranty Polestars, and yours might, too.

Ownership Costs

Speaking of service, Polestar 2s are recommended to be serviced on 20k mile intervals. This service includes: changing the cabin filter, changing the wiper blades, performing a basic multipoint vehicle inspection, charging the high-voltage battery to full, and, presumably, giving it a pat on the tailgate and calling it a good boy. For this service, my local Polestar Service Center will charge you $584.95 plus tax. In conjunction with the standard 20k mile service, every 40k miles Polestar recommends flushing the brake fluid, to the tune of $399 plus tax at my local Service Center.

If you, like I, find those prices to be a little steep, I’m happy to report there are much more affordable alternatives. I phoned up my personal Volvo mechanic and was quoted $250 for a 20k service. If you don’t mind turning your own torx bits though, DIY service doesn’t get much simpler than this. From start to finish, changing the cabin filter took me exactly 1 minutes and 27 seconds to replace. The wipers are like any other car’s, and clearing the maintenance reminder just takes a gear-lever toggle and a press of the steering wheel buttons. With parts from FCP Euro, I completed my last 20k mile service for just $63.98.

While certain jobs like EFAD/ERAD fluid replacement and major hardware replacements are probably best left for trained technicians, it goes to show just how economical it can be to own a used Polestar 2 with a little ingenuity Especially once you consider that access to dealer-level diagnostic software via Orbit can be had for just $100, ongoing DIY diagnostic and repair work is much more accessible than you’d think.

That being said, not everything can be cheaper than an ICE car. Like any EV, Polestar 2s can go through tires much quicker than its gas-engined stablemates. While you might suffer a slight range deficit, fitting a standard high-performance all-season tire can definitely help you eke out more from your contact patch investment. It’s also important to note that, on average, EV insurance rates are about 42% higher than an equivalent ICE vehicle, and I’d recommend shopping around before signing on the dotted line.

Why You Should

As someone who endures a 70-mile roundtrip commute five to six days a week, it’s hard to ignore the economics of a used EV. Prior to my Polestar 2, I was daily driving a 2006 Mercedes Benz E350 wagon. While I absolutely adored that car for my commute, it was costing me upwards of $800 a month in fuel! Ever since I bought my Polestar, I have largely been charging at home using SDG&E’s off-peak power rates. At 12 cents per kilowatt hour, my driving habits tend to only cost me between $60 and $70 a month. Even if you don’t drive as much as I do, I invite you to do the math for yourself. You might just be surprised.

Possibly the best part of owning this car is the lack of anxiety it brings me. It’s so refreshing to own an appliance I don’t have to be really invested in, making sure it keeps operating as designed. When I smell burning oil in traffic, it’s so relaxing to know it can’t possibly be me. Compared to the other vehicles I own, its ease of maintenance and care just are a welcome relief in my otherwise chaotic life.

It’s almost cathartic knowing that, one day, once its range is depleted and the remainder of its value has evaporated, it will be harvested for parts and crushed into a cube. But until that day, which I believe is still fairly far away, I will enjoy bombing around in my Polestar 2. And I think many of you might too.

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