- The Polestar 4 goes on sale in the U.S. this fall and it will get one of the most offbeat features of any car.
- The coupe-shaped crossover does not get a rear windshield. Instead, drivers have to use a digital rearview mirror to look behind.
- I drove the Polestar 4 to check this feature out in the real world. Here's what it feels like.
When the Polestar 4 goes on sale in the U.S. this fall, it will be one of the most unique cars on the market. The Swedish automaker has deleted the rear window on its coupe-shaped crossover, meaning the rear is now fully covered by an aluminum body panel. Drivers can still look at what’s behind, thanks to a digital rearview mirror.
On its face, that seems like a turn-off for many traditional buyers. But when I drove the Polestar 4 in Austin, Texas, last week, the lack of a rear window felt strange at first—but it was never inconvenient.
Polestar said it ditched the rear window to maintain the coupe-like design, while retaining the vehicle’s structural stiffness and interior headroom.
The company’s reasoning was something along these lines: Most electric crossovers look stubby and ride high because of their floor-mounted battery packs. To keep passengers from sitting like they’re squatting with their knees up, automakers have to raise both the seats and the roofline to provide adequate headroom. That approach doesn’t bode well for low-slung coupes, according to Polestar.
The second big reason was structural. The roof area above the rear passengers plays a key role in rollover protection. Removing the rear windscreen helps preserve that rigidity while still maintaining the coupe-like shape.
So the company went ahead and installed a 2.5-megapixel camera where the shark-fin antenna would normally go, which sends a feed directly to the digital rearview mirror with imperceptible latency. A second camera, right next to it, handles the advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) functions.
The company said this tends to be the cleanest area of the vehicle and demonstrated how rain doesn't affect it. If the rear section gets covered under heavy snow, you only wipe the camera bump, not the whole window.
The contrast looked high, brightness looked great (though that’s hardly a challenge under the Texas sun) and even small details appeared sharply defined in the digital rearview mirror. I wear glasses for moderate myopia, so refocusing from the road to the camera feed took a little getting used to, but it quickly felt natural.
I wish the camera were tilted slightly downward to include the rear edge of the car in the frame. That would make it easier to judge the distance when vehicles approach from behind. As it stands, vehicles look far closer than they really are, which can be mildly unnerving when you’re staring at the hood of a pickup truck.
If the camera breaks or fails, the inside mirror goes dark, Polestar engineers said. Replacement would be your only option. It was unclear at the time of writing how much that would cost or if it would be covered under warranty. This feature is reportedly popular among customers overseas, with the vast majority of them quickly getting used to it.
And truth be told, coupe-shaped crossovers don’t have great rear visibility anyway. I’m not a fan of what you can see (or can't see, I suppose) out of the Tesla Model Y or the Ford Mustang Mach-E, which have very sharply raked rear windscreens offering a skewed view of the traffic behind.
And Polestar isn’t the first to offer digital rearview mirrors. Plenty of automakers already do that, even on cars that have large rear windows. General Motors has been doing this for years, especially on its Cadillac models. On the 2026 Kia EV9 press loaner that I tested recently, rear visibility was terrible with the third-row headrests up. It was even worse with passengers occupying that row. So on the top trims, Kia offers a digital rearview mirror, which I ended up using the whole time.
However, it allows you to switch between the traditional and digital mirrors, something you can’t do with the Polestar 4 due to the lack of a rear windscreen.
The Polestar 5 sedan, which is TBD on a U.S. release, features the same setup. It’s not perfect, but it works remarkably well once you get used to it. The design also gives these EVs a cleaner, more chiseled rear end and a distinct edge over sister brand Volvo’s EVs. And the Polestar 4 has plenty more going for it. Its coupe silhouette without a rear window is just one part of its character, not its whole identity.
In other words: don't knock it until you try it.
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