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Putting the Volvo S60 Polestar Concept through its paces

Unfortunately, the Volvo S60 Polestar Concept will not be coming to a dealership near you anytime soon. It’s purely an experiment to determine if the public would be interested in 508-hp, racing-bred Volvos. Chris Harris, of Chris Harris on Cars, took a deeper look at the car on a snowy racetrack in Europe and even brought a Mercedes-Benz C63 AMG for some perspective.

(Another) Audi A3 e-tron hybrid at Geneva 2013

The Audi A3 e-tron – a hybrid A3 EV based on the A3 Sportback – will debut at the 2013 Geneva Motor Show as a concept. This Audi A3 e-tron isn’t a pointless electric supercar – like the R8 e-tron – or another rollout of the A3 e-tron BEV, but a hybrid A3 with a proper ICE engine coupled to an electric motor, just like the A3 e-tron concept we saw in Shanghai in 2011 That still means a lot of complicated and heavy technology to game the silly official economy tests and come up with ‘official’ economy figures of 158mpg and 35g/km, but the A3 e-tron would – if it were made – offer big tax breaks for company car drivers. The A3 e-tron gets a 1.4 litre direct injection petrol engine good for 148bhp working with an electric motor good for an extra 100bhp.

Volvo S60 Polestar goes in to production

It sounded like a plan to put it in to production – even if it would probably need twin turbos to make it nicely wieldy on the road – and that’s exactly what Volvo and Polestar have done. The Volvo S60 Polestar has gone in to limited production, initially for the Australian market, but instead of the mighty 508bhp of the concept it has to make do with a more pedestrian 350bhp, little more than the V60 we reviewed last year with the Polestar upgrade. But the extra power is enough to get the production S60 Polestar to 62mph in 4.9 seconds and, thanks to tweaks to the suspension, brakes and aerodynamics, the S60 Polestar looks like it will be able to handle the power quite well.