A Polestar 3 Electric Vehicle at Panamint Springs Resort - December 2023
On December 9, 2023, I walked from the RV Park to the
Panamint Springs General Store to call home. The evening before, there
had been a lot of commotion at the Panamint Springs Resort. The owner
and his helping hand had repaired the RV sewer line, which connects the
ten RV spaces to the leach field, farther downhill. Weeks earlier, at
the beginning of the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, it became clogged by Tamarisk tree roots.
Early
that evening, a taco truck had pulled into the RV Park and plugged
into one of the RV shore-power pedestals. The truck, with its crossed up
wiring immediately shut down the electrical to that pedestal. Next the
truck owner ran an extension cord to another pedestal and shut down the
electricity to the entire RV portion of the
resort. To complete the chaos, the resort Panamint Springs, t owner was in his backhoe,
dragging away the ancient derelict airplane from its spot near the fuel
station.
What was a taco truck was doing in Panamint Springs? Why was the resort
owner dragging an airplane away from the scene? After I reported the
electrical issue, the exasperated owner drove to the taco truck scene
and his helping hand roared up in a pickup truck. After admonishing the
taco truck driver to unplug 
his
ersatz rig from the pedestal, the power miraculously came back on at my
coach. That was enough excitement for one evening, so I chalked it up
to another strange happening in the desert.
In the morning, I limped over to the general store,
nursing my injured left hip. There, while making my Wi-Fi call home I
discovered a full Hollywood-style film shoot wrapping up after three
days in the desert. Rumors, which were later confirmed by several
people, indicated that it was a Swedish film crew associated with the
car maker Volvo. So that it would not be in the photo shoot of an
electric vehicle approaching the gas pumps, the owner of the Panamint
Springs Resort had dragged the old airplane away and behind the general
store.
Why
an electric vehicle would need to approach gas pumps implies that
there will be some form of irony in the TV commercial that results from
this shoot. The current scene included the film crew, support trucks, a
high-tech Pursuit Systems camera car,
passenger cars and three California Highway Patrol vehicles. When I
arrived on the scene, everyone in the crew was finishing their lunch.
That, at least explained what a taco truck was doing in the middle of
the Mojave Desert.
According to one low ranking crew member, many of the crew came here from Sweden. “We spent three days filming near Badwater in Death Valley
and here in the Panamint Valley today. It was amazing to be escorted
across the desert at dawn by Highway Patrol with lights flashing.”
About then, the crew boss came up and broke up our conversation. Lunch
was over and the crew 
member said the whole encampment would be gone in three hours.
As I watched, two California Highway Patrol vehicles, the camera car and a white Polestar 3 prototype, which was sporting Swedish license plates headed out on to Highway 190. They had planned for some “B-Roll” filming on their way back toward Los Angeles.
As of this writing, the Polestar 3 is open for orders, but is yet
undelivered. U.S. prices on the Volvo-created vehicle range from $83,995
to over $100,000, if fully optioned. In February 2024, just two months
after this expensive international junket from Sweden to Death Valley,
Volvo announced that it was selling the majority of its stake in
Polestar to its Chinese partner, Geely. Already Volvo's largest
shareholder, Geely's takeover of Polestar is a complex international
transfer of ownership, benefiting many of the respective companies
legacy shareholders.
As
the striking white vehicle pull soundlessly away, I wondered how the
Polestar crew was able to keep such a high-performance electric vehicle
charged up and ready to roll across three days of desert driving. Was
it the “long range” version, or did it secretly sport an internal
combustion engine in addition to an electric drive motor? With
collapsing sales of pure EV power-trains, perhaps it was an unannounced
hybrid or plugin hybrid electric vehicle. My guess is that we will
never know. The Polestar 3, designed in Sweden, manufactured in
Chengdu, China and then plying the desolate roads of Death Valley
National Park certainly was an oddity.
Just after the Polestar 3 entourage hit the highway, about a dozen
Harley Davidson motorcycles roared past the remaining CHP car and
prepared to pump gas for their rides. The scene was one of controlled
chaos, reminiscent of 
Marlin
Brando leading an outlaw motorcycle gang in the takeover of a small
town in the 1953 movie, The Wild One. Now, seventy years later, there
was lots of noise and fury, but I saw no lawlessness or destruction.
By then, the Pursuit Camera vehicle and the Polestar 3 were well down
the highway. That camera car can follow the live action of any vehicle
within its viewfinder. If the subject vehicle passes the camera, the
camera boom and lens will follow it and keep it within the frame. The
camera system itself was like nothing I had ever seen. It was installed
on a long, fully gimballed boom and was computer controlled from
inside the Pursuit vehicle.
All of this strangeness reminded me of several early Twilight Zone
television episodes filmed in or around Death Valley. The whole scene
raised several questions in my mind. As mentioned before, how did they
charge the battery pack on an electric vehicle in the middle of nowhere?
Why would a Swedish crew 
spend
so much money filming a commercial in the unforgiving Mojave Desert?
Why would a Polestar 3 television commercial feature a lonely gas
station in the desert? I can hardly wait to find out the answers to my
questions, if I ever will.
True to the old Twilight Zone conceit, when I returned to the area
three hours later there was no trace of the film crew or their temporary
encampment. There is an old adage that goes, "If a tree fell in a
forest and no one was there, did it make a sound?" Likewise, "If a
Polestar 3 drove in the desert and no one saw it, was it really there?"
This is Part Six of a Seven Part article. To read Part Seven, Click HERE. To return to Part One, click HERE.
