The latest color on new Volvo R-Design is Polestar Blue or Rebel Blå.
What a great color!

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2011 Volvo C30 Polestar PCP

“It’s cool, but they’ll never build it.” That’s what we thought when the Volvo C30 Polestar Performance Concept Prototype debuted last year in Gothenburg; if you’re a Volvo fan, we know you thought the same thing. But here we are, sitting on a canyon road in Southern California in that very same car with Polestar’s marketing director in the passenger seat. Would he really fly himself and the car all that way for nothing?

“Come to a stop and rev it to 3000,” he tells us, probably to change the subject from whether this car will marry an assembly line and make many babies. All we can think is how a stock C30 would handle this, and images of one smoking, screaming front tire flash through our mind. That, plus the fact that this is a one-off concept car. But okay, whatever you say.

Polestar’s engineers aren’t stupid. These same people built two C30 race cars that went on to claim the 2009 and 2010 Scandinavian Touring Car Championship’s team titles, and they’ve branched out this year into WTCC racing as well. The company résumé doesn’t include building useless cars. That’s why in addition to a ton of power (405 hp total, and 376 lb-ft of torque), the team robbed a V50 of its all-wheel drive system and bolted it up under this C30. “The Haldex will sort it all out,” our friend in the passenger seat assures us. But we’d just had a Red Bull and our feet are jittery. Three-thousand rpm becomes more like 5000 by the time we dump the clutch, which slips slightly as the little Volvo jumps forward without so much as a chirp from the tires. This is the first hint that this isn’t just the best C30 we’ve driven, it might be the best Volvo we’ve driven.

Only limited available in certain markets: Volvo C30 R-design in Rebel Blue

More on the 2011 Volvo C30 Polestar PCP on Swedespeed.