[Kieran]

I got my P2 almost a month back and it has generally been flawless (PAK aside). I have done over 2500km and love driving the on all sorts of roads.
Updated to 2.0 a few nights back. Today, I jumped out in busy street to get some cash from an ATM and when I returned minutes later the car did not recognise my key or my phone. It was locked, and pressing the key's physical buttons did nothing either (including the boot/trunk).
Using the physical blade, I was able to get into the passenger door, however it sent the alarm off, much to the bemusement of the many passersby. I called Polestar Roadside Assist who, after asking whether my car was petrol, diesel or hybrid (and with that stole my confidence), assured me that the roadie would know what to do.
Nice fellow arrived 90 mins later but had never heard of or seen a Polestar (going by the badge he thought it was a sporty Citroen). Needless to say, he had no idea what to do and so I showed him how to disconnect the battery and TCAM by reference to the gurus on this forum (Thank You!).
Regrettably the reset has done nothing. Having unlocked the car from the inside, I can't lock the car externally. I appear to be able to drive, but only when the key is in the armrest/cupholder. Anywhere else in the cabin and it doesn't recognise a key being present.
The overhead SOS and Connect buttons are now not illuminated, but I do have a "sos" red icon on the instrument binacle.
When I try and kick/swipe the boot, I get beeped at by the car. The car otherwise doesn't appear to recognise either key unless it's in that one place and my phone lock/climate functions are now unable to be connected (the App can't connect to the car, PAK aside (which never could)).
Is this a known issue? I couldn't find it here. Is it related to the 2.0 OTA update? I have the latest PS phone App...
So, gurus out there, can you help me? because I'm afraid that Polestar Australia won't have a clue!

 

[Man8ck]

Have you tried to lock and unlock the car using the other key, I'm assuming you have been provided a secondary "Activity" key with no buttons?

 

[Kieran]

Yep, tried that in vain also 

 

[ArcElectric]

Whole thread about it: P2.0 OTA - Unable to Lock or Unlock

 

[Kieran]

Thanks. Will have to try the reset again

 

[mxs]

I called Polestar Roadside Assist who, after asking whether my car was petrol, diesel or hybrid…

Are you serious? Must be some third party doing support in your country … Volvo?

I don’t have anything constructive to add, but this sort of trouble has me really worried, since it seems, it can happen out of blue (no warning signs given), and there is not much one can do to remedy it, no matter how handy you are…. Do I understand it correctly, that you were able to drive home, with a key in your cupholder? Otherwise, they would have to tow you??

 

[RP-P2]

4 months to wait for my car and I am pretty sure I will not end up in a P2 if every day I am reading stuff like this. I would probably have more tolerance for issues if it was just me, but to think of being put in some of these situations with my wife and kids....I don't know. I need my cars to work with how busy and active we are. And then just thinking of the embarrassment of having to explain away SW issues and glitches to friends, family, co-workers, etc. on a $50k+ car. I feel myself getting a little less excited each day. I may not actually be ready for these computers on wheels hi-tech EVs

 

[richlarcombe]

@Kieran would definitely give the polestar customer support a call and ask to speak with technical support guys. The one I spoke with yesterday knew the car inside out, and sounded keen to help if serious issues did present themselves.

 

[Somun]

This may help, or not but just 2 days ago I also had a key not recognized issue which turned out to be related to the one of the doors not being properly shut: My 7 yo daughter got in the back and pulled the left back door closed (but apparently not fully). When I tried to back out from the parkway the dash said it could not detect a key. Put my key in the hidden cupholder area and could put the car into rear gear but was annoyed by the issue, thinking if the fob battery was dead, etc. Removed the fob from cupholder and tried again and the car again said it could not detect any keys. Then I remembered how the car was finicky about locking when a door was not fully closed so I went out and re-shut the back left door. When I got back on my seat, everything was working again.

I can understand the car refusing to respond the lock/unlock when the doors are not fully shut (an error beep or some indication would be better of course) but keys not being detected? That is weird. I am not saying that was your issue but keep this anecdote in mind.

 

[gaedho]

I had the very same scenario except it happened while the car was in my garage. I managed to go directly to the Service Center. (First unplanned visit to the Service Center - Keys not recognized)

Thanks @ArcElectric for the links to the specific discussion about that Lock/Unlock problem after P2.0 OTA.

 

[Kieran]

Update - I've now done the proper TCAM reset. When roadside assist and I were fumbling through it all lastnight, we disconnected the wrong thing (a nearby white plug) rather than removing, and then disconnecting, the TCAM battery. All good so far on restart and reconfigure... Just a matter of seeing whether it lasts.
@richlarcombe it bodes well that you've had some positive experiences with Aus tech guys, with time hopefully there'll be many others
@mxs the roadside assistance with NRMA, a state-based all-car roadside assist program, rather than specifically Polestar (or even Volvo). He was telling me that Volvo don't given them any cars to practice on, so that they're not much help when novel issues, like this, arise. I was able to drive with the key in the cupholder, but then didn't dare lock the car (or even know I could) when leaving it. But all good for now!

 

[Sinister_Crayon]

4 months to wait for my car and I am pretty sure I will not end up in a P2 if every day I am reading stuff like this.

The quickest way to talk yourself out of any large purchase is to hang around forums talking about the ownership experience.

I've been on forums for my motorbikes and cars over a couple of decades now... hell I helped set one up at one point. Every one of them is full of stories of people getting stranded due to tech or hardware issues (keys failing, fuel pumps dying, batteries dying, you name it). As cars have become more software and less mechanical... yes, even ICE cars... those problems have manifested in weird and wonderful ways. Hang around a Tesla forum, or a Porsche forum, or an Audi forum, or a BMW forum or hell ANY car forum and you'll come away convinced that each one of these is the worst possible vehicle for your use case and will never buy any of them due to analysis paralysis.

The reason is simple; people don't jump onto forums to talk about good ownership experiences because they aren't interesting. And even if people do, nobody engages or pays attention to the post. Discord drives clicks... it's as simple as that. That's something online advertisers have learned and leverage every day in a million different ways to drive engagement mostly by invoking shock or anger. Positive emotions don't drive engagement quite as well.

As there are more of these cars on the road, there will be more problems. But these sorts of problems are just an anomaly and represent a small percentage of the cars on the road. During the first year the Polestar 2 was sold, a good solid chunk of its owners were right here talking about problems. But as we get into the second and third years of manufacture the percentage of Polestar 2 owners on here is rapidly declining; most people don't get into online forums... I've seen at least three Polestar 2's in the St. Louis area and the drivers don't seem to engage with other Polestar 2 or even other EV owners. They're just an appliance to these people. These people aren't on this forum and will most likely go their entire ownership period of the car with zero issues.

There are some "beta" factors to the software in our cars, but I've yet to see anything that's truly show-stopping that could be attributed solely to this being an EV issue. The key issue that started this post might be software, but that's almost certainly the same software used in the same hardware for Volvo cars and so would just as easily happen to them... and in fact if you go on a Volvo forum I'll bet you dollars to donuts that you'll find posts describing this exact situation. Most of the rough edges in software appear to be AAOS which is the infotainment. Annoying, yes but not show-stopping. Even the TCAM issues on which people are more and more quiet about all the time might actually be the Streisand effect in action more often than not. Even I've been guilty of that; doing a TCAM reset that I'm pretty sure was not necessary just because I lost LTE. Well, there are plenty of reasons you might lose LTE and real TCAM failures are probably actually very rare.

Anyway, this turned out longer than I'd hoped, and really you have to make the decision that's going to work best for you personally. For my needs my Polestar 2 hit 6000 miles this week in 5 months and I've had exactly zero show-stopping issues. In two weeks I plan to drive her to Detroit again for a 10 day business trip (ouch!) and have zero concerns or fears about the car giving me any issues.

 

[bnic1955]

This may help, or not but just 2 days ago I also had a key not recognized issue which turned out to be related to the one of the doors not being properly shut: My 7 yo daughter got in the back and pulled the left back door closed (but apparently not fully). When I tried to back out from the parkway the dash said it could not detect a key. Put my key in the hidden cupholder area and could put the car into rear gear but was annoyed by the issue, thinking if the fob battery was dead, etc. Removed the fob from cupholder and tried again and the car again said it could not detect any keys. Then I remembered how the car was finicky about locking when a door was not fully closed so I went out and re-shut the back left door. When I got back on my seat, everything was working again.

I can understand the car refusing to respond the lock/unlock when the doors are not fully shut (an error beep or some indication would be better of course) but keys not being detected? That is weird. I am not saying that was your issue but keep this anecdote in mind.

Me Too! - just the rear nearside door not fully closed caused this "Key not recognised" error. Nice safety feature but badly needs to point to a "Check doors are closed" error - or better still show which door is not properly latched shut! Every car I have owned in the last 20 years has had a dashboard display to show an open door, so can be done! Spent an anxious 15 minutes trying various thongs then cam and pulled this up. Thank You Forum. Polestar - have a programmer spend 5 minutes making this a more helpful message - and put into the next OTA patch, please!

2022 AWD magnesium, base.

 

[mxs]

Actually, a Polestar acknowledged this as a “feature” … not a bug, on their FB page when someone complained. In return, number of people told them, please have the error message say something useful, but yet keep the reason for the trigger in place. Hopefully, they will fix that quickly as it’s not that difficult, obviously.

 

[ThunderEyes]

The quickest way to talk yourself out of any large purchase is to hang around forums talking about the ownership experience.

I've been on forums for my motorbikes and cars over a couple of decades now... hell I helped set one up at one point. Every one of them is full of stories of people getting stranded due to tech or hardware issues (keys failing, fuel pumps dying, batteries dying, you name it). As cars have become more software and less mechanical... yes, even ICE cars... those problems have manifested in weird and wonderful ways. Hang around a Tesla forum, or a Porsche forum, or an Audi forum, or a BMW forum or hell ANY car forum and you'll come away convinced that each one of these is the worst possible vehicle for your use case and will never buy any of them due to analysis paralysis.

Well said. My current (soon to be former) car, a Kia Niro EV, has a dedicated forum on insideevs forums. When I was buying my car, I found a thread full of people complaining about a tapping sound which dealerships struggled to fix. In some cases they had to take the car back to the dealership 3 or 4 times and go months without driving anything but a loaner car. Some even ended up returning the car due to lemon laws.

This was a little unnerving to me, but despite reading all this, I went ahead and bought the car.

Guess what - zero faults with the car. No warranty problems. No maintenance problems. The only reason I'm leaving that car behind is because I don't care for the car's look and it's not the best for road trips.