When R Became Polestar (2015–now)
Polestar started as an independent Swedish racing team that tuned Volvos, long before it became a name buyers recognised. By the mid-2010s Volvo had bought the operation outright, and the S60 Polestar and V60 Polestar (2015–2018) became the closest thing to a direct successor the old R cars had: a turbocharged and supercharged 3.0-litre inline-six, Haldex all-wheel drive again, and a chassis tuned by the same people who used to race these cars.
Officially, "R" was never applied to this generation — Volvo let the badge lapse and let Polestar's own name carry the weight instead. Enthusiasts folded it into the same lineage anyway, because the engineering brief hadn't changed: take a comfortable Swedish estate and make it uncomfortable to leave behind at the lights.
Polestar Engineered: the plug-in chapter
From 2019, the S60 T8 Polestar Engineered and its siblings swapped the inline-six for a turbocharged four-cylinder paired with an electric motor and a battery pack, adding Öhlins manually-adjustable dampers and Akebono six-piston front brakes as the hardware flex instead of raw displacement. Combined output climbed past 400 hp, most of it available from a standstill thanks to the electric motor.
Polestar has since split off as its own standalone electric car brand, building dedicated models rather than tuned Volvos — which arguably closes this chapter of the story rather than continuing it. Whether that counts as the R lineage ending or just changing its name one more time is, fittingly, still argued about on the same forums where all of this history lives.