McLaren's plug-in hybrid supercar gets a host of powertrain and chassis revisions to increase its performance and excitement factor
McLaren Automotive CEO Michael Leiters says he wants to take the company’s road-going products back towards their motorsport roots. To draw clearer and more evocative parallels between them and the racing machines for which the company is even more widely known, and carve out a bolder character and identity for them in the process.Sounds sensible - but the two years that Leiters is just approaching in the job is a pretty short window of time in product development terms. So isn’t now too early to seek to judge any 'Leiters effect'? Well, perhaps it isn’t. The McLaren 750S certainly shows signs of a shift in priorities towards the wild, expressive and dramatic; and now we know that its little sibling, the revised Artura plug-in hybrid supercar, does also.‘Revised’ may be the wrong descriptor for this car, actually. It feels more as if the Artura’s launch has been reset. Leiters came to the chair at McLaren around the same time as the Artura’s troubled and delayed market launch in summer 2022. Significant technical revisions to the car followed; but sales have been slow to do likewise, Woking executives now admit.So it feels like McLaren’s main motivation in making these revisions, for the 2025-model-year and coming only two years into the Artura's life, is simply to give it a fresh start: with the press, dealers and customers alike. And the wider the revisions, perhaps, the fresher the start.Rebooted or otherwise, however, the Artura remains one of McLaren's boldest cars yet. Between its British-built carbonfibre monocoque, its ethernet electrical architecture, its superformed aluminium bodywork and its V6 plug-in hybrid powerplant, this is probably the most technically daring project that McLaren has undertaken since the McLaren P1 hypercar – and quite possibly ever.Range at a glanceThe Artura options list is quite extensive. There are six no-cost paint colours, but nearly 30 others you can pick (before you get into commissioning your own colour); there are three wheel designs; and numerous further exterior trim and equipment spec choices.McLaren corrals the car’s most important optional features into seven packages: the Gloss Black Interior Finish Pack, the Technology, TechLux and Vision Interior packs, and the Performance and MSO Carbonfibre Interior packs. The Technology Pack is the priciest (£6800) but includes 360deg cameras, Bowers & Wilkins audio, LED headlights, intelligent cruise, road sign recognition and lane departure warning.
