An all-electric Dakar rally concept submitted to the Polestar Design Contest 2024 — closed monocoque cabin, jacked-up rally stance, oversized off-road wheels carrying the Polestar mark on every spoke. Paired with a Hot Wheels collectible to argue that a brand-builder can live as both a hero render and a die-cast on a shelf.
The Polestar Dakar .01 was my submission to the Polestar Design Contest 2024. The brief asked for a vehicle that could carry the Polestar brand into a new territory — so rather than another road-going saloon or SUV, I proposed a closed-cabin, all-electric Dakar rally machine: low, wide, sitting on enormous off-road tyres, with the Polestar mark cut directly into the wheel spokes as a four-fold rotational graphic.
The surface language is deliberately Polestar — long uninterrupted bodysides, a clean black greenhouse that wraps almost all the way down to the rocker, sharp planar haunches over the rear wheels. The rally-specific elements (spare tyre strapped to the deck, leather hold-down straps in oxide orange, the "100% Electric" wordmark on the door) are tools added to a clean object, not styling tricks layered onto it.
Modelled in Rhinoceros using SubD for the body shell and the wheel architecture, surfaced and detailed with NURBS for the rigid panels. Final imagery rendered in Unreal Engine across two locations — soft desert dunes for motion, hard salt flats for product clarity — so the same vehicle could be sold as both an action hero and a static brand object.
The second half of the submission was a Hot Wheels × Polestar collectible: a 1:64 die-cast of the Dakar .01 in a custom blister pack. The argument: a vehicle's brand value is measured by whether a child wants the toy. If yes, the design has done its real job.
Two render environments doing two jobs. The desert sequence proves the car works in motion — kicked-up sand, blurred backgrounds, low-angle storytelling. The salt-flat sequence isolates the form against an almost-white ground so the volumes can be read cleanly.
Half of the submission was a packaged collectible — a 1:64 die-cast of the Dakar .01 in a custom Hot Wheels blister pack. Treated as a real product, not as a gag: the card art uses the contest typography, the carded back features the Polestar mark, and the toy itself simplifies down cleanly to the volumes you can read in the renders.
The point is that a brand-building concept fails if it only exists as a hero render. A piece of plastic on a shelf has to look right too. That test surfaced real design decisions early — closed cabin instead of open, four-fold rotational wheel graphic instead of a centred logo, hard planar haunches over the rear wheels rather than soft fender forms.
The Dakar .01 was built almost entirely with SubD geometry in Rhinoceros 7 — a workflow that gives you cleanly-flowing surfaces over complex transitions (front bumper to fender, rocker to rear haunch) without the seams that fall out of NURBS surfacing when surfaces fight each other.
Three views below show the underlying topology. The wheel architecture is a single rotationally-symmetric module — five-fold radial pattern with a four-arm Polestar mark cut into the centre as the only deliberate break in the rhythm.
The same Rhino model was taken into Unreal Engine for a real-time visualisation pass — a sequence that drops the vehicle into multiple environments without re-rendering. Useful for review and for arguing that the surface language survives any light, any ground, any backdrop.
The clip below walks the car through the level transitions used during the contest pitch.
The full image set, including additional renders and process notes, lives on Behance.
EV concept, motorsport programme, or a brand-building hero vehicle that also has to live on a collector's shelf — send a brief and we'll come back within two working days.
Request a quote