I never understood why Polestar R&D would design a 60K sports sedan and say, well we have bigger turbos on this, what say we narrow out the intake and choke em down. We only want 350 hp anyway. If they could have gotten a significant power increase from basically a rerouted, larger pipe, they would have done it. Their cost would have been minimal. It would not be for sound. Anyone buying a Polestar is not worried about that. I'm not saying it may be needed to support other mods, but that also seems iffy at best.
It's more complicated than that, even if a factory-designed change to the intake could (possibly) give more power. First of all, do they want to design these to have more power? Maybe not. Perhaps Volvo met their performance targets and didn't feel the need to make the cars any faster, more powerful, and potentially more prone to breaking or being compared directly with other performance sedans that might end up trouncing it in a direct performance comparison as you might find in a car magazine review. Volvo possibly meant to bypass all that by slotting-in close-to, but not directly-with, competitors' more conventional performance-oriented volume sellers (think dime-a-dozen B8 S4 or BMW 335) with Volvo's more-unique take on the performance car experience: excellent more for subjective reasons such as character, uniqueness, style, handling, etc., and not meant to be compared directly to those other cars strictly as a "numbers car". In any case, these cars leave power on the table with their factory ECU tuning decisions. If Volvo wanted more power, they could have simply turned up the wick on the factory tune, which they didn't, which I think adds evidence to the fact that they met certain performance targets and didn't feel the need for more. (Holding back those numbers may have also been done in order to make the upcoming 2.0T P* cars more appealing, if they were to be introduced with even better numbers than the 3.0T cars, to silence the anticipated pushback from "purists" complaining about the 3.0T being axed)
The aforementioned considerations are likely only part of what's at play here. I suspect it has more to do with the fact that these cars are selling in tiny quantities and the R&D and tooling costs to produce a batch of new intakes for a relatively small bump in power simply wouldn't have been worth the effort from a cost/ benefit point of view. Especially when raising output could easily be accomplished with a software tweak if that was the desired effect. Also keep in mind that these low-volume cars are being sold globably in different markets each with their own set of emissions standards, crash standards, pedestrian-hitting standards (making underhood packaging a very real issue, which may, in fact, be the biggest reason that the intake is routed this way). Changing the intake design might be enough to make the car not warm up as quickly, which could impact upon how it performs during aspects of emissions testing. Or it could reduce the space between hood and engine designed to cushion pedestrians in certain markets' pedestrian safety testing, making it not meet current or future safety standards within those markets. Adding extra NVH, warmup time, etc., might also have been biproducts of a change to intake design that Volvo engineers wished to avoid.
