The McLaren Artura is the Most Livable, Lively Supercar (POV Drive Review)
battery pack being in the floor helps it’s a lightning bolt hey crew I’ll get the key did that McLaren artura we are going to take it for a drive but first let’s check it out what looks on the inside and outside this is McLaren’s first series production hybrid and it’s intended to replace the 570s as their starting point supercar up here at the nose we’ve got a distinctive Arrow sculpted face with black gloss and lots of functional Cooling the signature Crescent headlights with projector LEDs above some Led drls and turn signals this paint job is
called silica white it’s a no-cost color at the side is a set of forged alloy wheels 19s in the front 20s at the rear wrapped in Pirelli P0 course attires 235 section front 295 at the rear within those wheels are Standard carbon ceramic brakes with available orange painted calipers above the front wheels are these louvers to extract the turbulent moving air out of the wheel arches and channel it underneath the door mirrors beneath these sculpted door handles and into the air intakes above those we find some floating buttresses and beneath this metal engine grate which
looks okay I guess it’d be nice if there was a glass partition letting you look in at the three liter twin turbo V6 beneath stepping back
this gloss black diffuser though it is a gentle evolution of the 570s design I think this is the prettiest McLaren yet what do you guys think is this better or worse looking than the 570s predecessor let me know in the comments and let’s check out the interior opening up the dihedral doors which each only weigh 24 pounds and looking inside at this Baltimore colored interior in other words it’s black with a suede wrapped headliner leather seat borders suede inserts and orange piping on these power adjusting Comfort Seats McLaren also offers new club sport seats that
are each 20 pounds lighter you can pull these tabs to access a partial parcel parcel shelf it’s really hard for me to say and hit this button here to pop up the front trunk with five cubic feet of space I did manage to fit myself inside on the doors we find a mixture of leather suede and aluminum with one touch windows and door handle poles there’s a standard Bowers and look and sound system and get this this is the first time McLaren’s offering a subwoofer in one of its cars so what did they do they
integrated it within the new carbon fiber chassis of this car that’s how committed they are to the sound system in the artura drivers get a leather wrapped steering wheel with a flat bottom it feels great in the hands as do these giant aluminum paddles good travel to those there’s a digital instrument cluster and the whole housing moves with the steering wheel adjustment down and up and the graphics change with your drive mode that you now select on the right side of the housing in your suspension adjustments are on the left side the idea for the
placement of these settings is that you can do it while you’re holding on to the steering wheel here in the center of the cockpit is a floating eight inch touchscreen with a volume knob slash home button off to the right the graphics are really sharp it’s very responsive easy to use and it’s got Wireless Apple carplay and Android auto above that screen on the dashboard is suede wrapping orange piping we have four visible air vents a couple they’re here another one there your gear selection and start stop button under the suede wrap console is a
skinny bit of storage with a DC Outlet and two USB ports one a one C visibility is phenomenal for a Supercar no blind spot monitoring or rear cross traffic but they have added adaptive cruise control and Lane departure warning those features are kind of unheard of in super cars and I got to show you the Headroom situation because I’ve got plenty of it I can put on a helmet for track Duty no problem it gets a thumbs up from me and this cabin sticks with the minimalist theme for McLaren with nice upgrades it also retains
that driver Focus so let’s go do some driving all right let’s fire it up and that is the sound or lack thereof of the future of the supercar and I’ll tell you first why that’s great later I’ll tell you why it’s not just start why it’s awesome I was able to leave my home early this morning open the dihedral door sit in the seat hit the start stop button and then slink out of the area disturbing precisely no one in all of the Arturo’s competitors doing the startup sequence alone would have ignited some internal combustion
motor caused a Ruckus and at the very least made my neighbors Twitch in their beds the Arturo is how you avoid angry letters from your neighbors that’s that’s just what it is before we get moving let’s look at the capacity or rather the charge left in the battery it says we’ve got 68 percent and that equates to 11 miles of range when I unplug the air tour this morning it was at 100 charge and it said I’d 18 miles of range but that figure is based on the Euro test circuit here in the US they
test Vehicles differently and the estimated range Peak from McLaren is about 11 miles what we’re seeing right here so at 68 charge that’s equivalent to what seven miles that we have left in the battery it doesn’t sound like a ton but let’s get moving and talk more about that later to go into reverse hit the reverse button here and that will bring up a bird’s eye view here with some parking sensors and a backup camera here with trajectory lines to disengage the parking brake press that tab and one cool fact is that the McLaren Arturo
doesn’t have a reverse gear oh it’s going to drive you can either pull the paddle or hit the D button there it doesn’t have reverse gear it just spins the electric motor in reverse it’s kind of cool we’ll start off with a turning radius test as we usually do so here we are fully cranked and thanks to a short wheelbase we are able to Pivot around in just one go and if we’re disturbed about some bumps in the road we can raise the nose to avoid any scraping turn signal sound it’s not my favorite noise
in the world it’s not bad world famous horn test whoa that’s quite loud so here we are traveling in electric mode but we got to talk about the full powertrain setup so we have mid-mounted a twin turbocharged three liter v6 paired with that electric motor that is housed between the engine and an 8-speed automatic gearbox sending all of the power to the rear tires how much power miles well 671 horsepower and 531 pound-feet of torque I say that but here in electric mode we’re only using the 95 horsepower electric motor and so it’s enough for
scooting around town but if you need to floor it which I’ve been doing for the last five seconds very little will happen and what’s great about that is that in some EVS or plug-in hybrid EVS if you floor it the gas engine will just take over it’ll turn on and it’s like you need all the power in this one it won’t so you could just stay in electric mode for as long as the battery holds out which admittedly is not a terribly long amount of time but it might be enough for some people if you
wanted to commute in your Arturo and you were able to use the electric battery to take you to a freeway on-ramp where you could then toggle on one of the gas engine modes to then charge your battery for the extent of time to get to the freeway off-ramp then you could go back to Electric mode and have the electrification take you all the way to your office parking lot in theory I mean that’s just one circumstance that I could see you being able to optimize this setup and if not then you just use it to
silently get in and out of your neighborhood either way your fuel economy does benefit and this battery is just so simple to charge either in motion from the gas engine or plugged into a 110 household Outlet in like two and a half hours it’s fully replenished now to talk about the ride quality in the Arturo Which is far and away one of my favorite things about this vehicle just moseying about because thanks to the second generation of McLaren’s adaptive dampers and the fact that they mounted the gas engine and the electric motor on a liquid
platform which reduces vibrations the ride is so supple and smooth that this is probably if not at least tied with my favorite daily driving Supercar the Acura NSX and in my mind that is lofty territory these seats are fantastically comfortable as well not the most thickly padded things but their ergonomic shape means that the blood is always flowing and one more daily driver note most phevs have adjustable regen braking settings that’s not the case here near a Tura you can take your throttle and there is some slowing that happens from breaking regeneration but it’s not
something that you can control showing me that mclarinet wants the focus of driving the Arturo around town to be on ease of use and comfort and then when you want to go fast that’s the other Focus so let’s hit this tab here that gas engine kick on go into the track drive mode and prepare for a launch control for our real world 0-60 test to see how we do I’ve got my race box set up here and then for launch control I’ve got to be stopped fully and here with the left stock I pull in
to accept foot left hard on the brake pin the throttle build up the Boost it says go we barely got to 60 before I had to pull off the throttle so that we didn’t sidestep too much bogged off the line that’s the rear drive setup and that’s the real world nature of this test I wasn’t on a track so I couldn’t get a ton of heat into these P0 courses so we’re zero to 60 is 3.94 seconds now if all the conditions were right McLaren says this car should get to 60 a full second quicker
than we did so 2.9 seconds using these paddles they’re so fun to actuate and what do we think about the engine notes exhaust the note is more prominent than without it but this is the other part of the hybridized setup that I mentioned the beginning some was good in terms of being able to slink out of your neighborhood without making noise but the bad part is that engines have to accommodate the weight of an electric architecture they’ve had to downsize in displacement and cylinder count and the engine node has suffered with that and jumping back
to the commuters perspective let’s take things out of track we’ll go to comfort suspension and Powertrain and listen for the nvh level really not bad with a little throttle input we get some drone from that engine especially when it gets into that eighth gear but the wind and tire noise are kept to such minimums that the Arturo once again emphasizes it’s daily driver friendliness how friendly is it to the performance driver though let’s let’s go find out all right we are back at track powertrain track handling I’ve got stability control which you can operate independently
of the drive and handling modes on fully to start and we’re starting out in the auto mode for the transmission before we then explore the manual modes how we get on and that is with quite a bit of power and significant agility and the reason for that is twofold one the Arturo is the lightest vehicle in its class which is especially impressive considering it is a hybrid and so it does have the extra leap of the battery and EV motor while competing with non-hybrids it’s still lighter we also have that shorter wheelbase and so it
kind of darts into corners and the stability through the corner is also twofold one now that those zero courses have some heat in them they provide excellent grip and two the center of gravity in this car is very low the battery pack being in the floor helps hahaha it’s a lightning bolts but also because McLaren was able to engineer the V of this V6 with ultra wide cylinder Banks not quite as wide as of course a flat six but certainly wider than a traditional V and so that meant they could put the engine lower in
the chassis and inherently lower that center of gravity the power out of a corner is excellent thanks to a new electronic limited slip differential which is a departure from the big brake based torque vectoring system and the clearance typically used and so it shuttles the power between those rear tires instantly the steering is phenomenal and typical McLaren stuff thanks to the fact that they retained the hydraulic rack so I’ve got Oodles of feel here and I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that all of this is based on a new carbon fiber monocoque chassis
designed around that electrified Powertrain carbon ceramic brakes we put the kibosh on for momentum and the small distance of pedal travel means you get into the breadth the depth of the braking straight away lights agile planted powerful that is the Arturo and that’s just the McLaren way I’ll try now the manual mode and while the gear changes pretty spot on in track mode it is nice to have full control holy cow ers McLaren knows their craft exceptionally well I misjudged the artura when they revealed it I saw photos and I saw just slightly prettier 570s
but with the weight of electrification and this transition away from internal combustion and I just I got sad but this car it’s so Sensational to drive well I shouldn’t ever have second guessed McLaren I love manipulating this machine some supercars act like they know better than you and it may be true but I don’t want to sense that the McLaren Arturo in no way makes you feel like you are being withheld from the full engagement Factor all of your controls are so dialed and the feedback is so palpable that you can’t help but be 100
involved in what you’re doing and I see all this having had traction and stability control on this entire time who goes to show how good this car is mechanically then at no point in time have I have I sensed that my drive is being handicapped by traction or stability control this is just a feat that’s a cool little machine there that’s going to lead me into my miles per hour word of the day not that machine but the way the McLaren’s driving which is exacting meaning high demand on one’s skill and that’s both true of
the driver of the McLaren Arturo and the vehicle itself because to get the most out of this machine you have to demand a lot from your skill set but at the same time you can demand great performance from the Arturo and it will deliver at what cost though you ask well before we talk pricing and competition you know without a manual let’s go into sport let’s talk about the top speed and fuel economy for this Arturo top speed is an eye-watering 205 miles per hour while the fuel economy is if you’ve got the battery in
play the electric motor helping you out we’ve got 39 combined MPG equivalent if you don’t have that if you’ve tapped it then you’re looking at just 18 combined MPG not bad for a Supercar though I’ve talked about the charging and look how quickly we replenished the battery just with some fun driving in track mode so let’s talk pricing now the starting figure for the Arturo is 237 500 and this vehicle as tested is a shade under 254 000 bucks when thinking about competitors I’m just going to keep this discussion to vehicles in the mid 200
thousands territory I’m not going to bring in the Acura NSX because that’s significantly less expensive and I’m not going to bring in another plug-in hybrid Supercar the Ferrari 296 GTB because that’s significantly more expensive so we’ll just keep it to Vehicles like the Lamborghini Huracan Technica it starts at 245 thousand dollars pause just so I can just do this and say wow the Huracan Technica makes 630 horsepower gets to 60 in 2.7 seconds has a top speed of 200 miles per hour and fuel economy of 15 combined then we’ve got the what was next Ferrari
f8 tributo that starts at 281 000 it makes 710 horsepower gets to 60 and at 2.8 seconds and has a top speed of 212 miles per hour with fuel economy of 16 combined and finally the Maserati mc20 that starts at 216 000 it makes 621 horsepower gets to 60 punches I’ve got to do it again it’s another stream all right in 2.9 seconds has a top speed of 202 miles per hour and fuel economy of 17 combined I’m just okay all right gotta reach a verdict here the McLaren Arturo is now at least tied maybe
even beating the Acura NSX as the most livable Supercar and that’s a huge win for people who want to enjoy their high performance Vehicles as often as possible it is the benefit of an electrified power drain so you can just silent through your neighborhood not disturb anyone and then it has Sinister performance when you get it to the right Road you put it in the right modes and you put your foot down the only thing that doesn’t really overwhelm me in a positive way about the McLaren Arturo is that soundtrack because friends even as you
get to the upper part of the ref range you can get towards that 8800 RPM Redline there’s no character that develops and this is with the available Sports exhaust so it’s not going to sound any better from the factory and that’s a bit of a letdown you want your Supercar to be a full sensory experience and we get 90 of that in this car and that is a bit of a bummer which would I choose the Arturo the Huracan the f8 or the mc20 if I was just driving my car every once in a while
and I just wanted to make the most noise and feel the most I don’t know excitable just going in a straight line even I’d go with that Huracan Technica but if I actually wanted to drive my Supercar often and maybe take it on a trip and maybe stay friends with the people who live around me there is no better car than than the Arturo and when you do really get to have fun with it incredibly rewarding which would you guys choose though would you go martura would you go Huracan Technica would you go fa tributo
or let me know in the comments I hope you guys have enjoyed this POV Drive review if you did please like comment and share the video subscribe to the channel hit that Bell to get notified and before we have to prepare to stop I’m gonna prepare to go I’ll see you next time
