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Our Cars: McLaren Artura
2 years ago
A hot mess of reliability faults? Not so far...
Actually that’s a complete lie: it has gone wrong, but only because I dropped a wheel into a pothole so large I thought I’d ripped a corner off it. But no. Wheel and tyre, astonishingly, were fine. What wasn’t fine was the little sensor Pirelli puts in the tyre to allow it to talk to the car and let me know its temperature and pressure. And a new sensor meant a new tyre, and while that was being swapped over, the cruise control stalk was changed for the one it should have had from the start with the little button at the end that, if active cruise is specified, lets you choose the distance to the car in front.
Now that I’d describe myself as nicely settled in, I have a few observations to make. First, and it’s not something I can easily explain given that it’s an orange McLaren, it doesn’t get much attention. I’m sure there are some who’d regard that as grounds all by itself to not buy the car, but to me it’s a consideration as important as performance or handling.
I’ve driven too many cars in which you feel the eyes of the world upon you. I’m not so Scrooge-like as to resent an appreciative stare or thumbs up from the pavement, but when it results in morons circling you at point blank distance on the motorway, I draw a line. No, the Artura doesn’t afford quite Porsche 911 levels of anonymity, but it’s closer to that than any mid-engined Ferrari or Lambo I’ve driven of late.
"There’s another aspect I’m enjoying, so little discussed in supercar circles but so critical to one’s enjoyment. The car is just very comfortable. On cold winter mornings the heater starts channelling warmth into the car almost immediately. The seat heaters are excellent too"
Another thing I can’t explain is why I miss the little button marked ‘Active’ that you find on McLarens prior to this. It’s a pretty pointless thing to be honest, because all it does is make ‘live’ the switches for the various chassis and powertrain modes. I mean, why would you not want them on all the time? Which is clearly the conclusion reached by McLaren. But I still enjoyed that tiny scrap of theatre involved in pressing that button and bringing to life the controls that really determine how the car is going to behave.
A bigger, more substantive surprise is the torque of the 3-litre V6, and to illustrate my point, may I introduce you to an old friend of mine, the McLaren 720S. And you’ll probably not be surprised to know that even with hybrid assistance the Artura develops less torque than does the 4-litre V8 in the back of the 720S. But it’s not much less: 531lb ft all told, versus 567lb ft for its big brother. What is different is where that torque is developed: 5500rpm in the 720S, just 2250rpm in the Artura. But what is transformational is the Artura’s ability to maintain that peak all the way to 7000rpm. So at almost any speed in almost any gear, it just goes, as hard as it can, all the time.
"You could argue that something’s been lost, that there’s a sense of occasion in dropping a couple of cogs, waiting for the turbos to let rip, but by then the Artura would already be past whatever has got in the way and disappearing into the distance"
You could argue that something’s been lost here, that there’s a sense of occasion in dropping a couple of cogs, waiting for the turbos to let rip, but by then the Artura would already be past whatever has got in the way and disappearing into the distance. And, of course, you can still do that, and enjoy the benefit of a V6 that sounds rather better when fully extended than the old V8. What you cannot argue is that the ability of the hybrid system to bridge the gap between the request for torque and the turbos spinning up to deliver it has essentially eliminated the lag that was perhaps the most frequently criticised characteristic of the V8 engine.
There’s another aspect I’m enjoying, so little discussed in supercar circles but so critical to one’s enjoyment. The car is just very comfortable. On cold winter mornings the heater starts channelling warmth into the car almost immediately, because it’s not reliant on a big internal combustion engine that needs to warm up. The seat heaters are excellent too, as is the optional (but I would grade as essential) 12-speaker premium audio system. Compared to the barely adequate standard four-speaker setup that was in a 720S I had a while back, the difference is vast. And of course I can see out of it, in all directions, and even the bits of the infotainment system not included in the now mercifully standard CarPlay are easy to understand.
Less positively, the hybrid system has its foibles. The claimed EV range is only 19 miles – sensible enough as any more would only make the car heavier, the last thing you want a McLaren to be – but I rarely see more than about 14 before the ICE motor chimes in. Perhaps it’s because it’s been cold, perhaps it’s because I live in a fairly hilly part of the world, I don’t know. But range can be limited further by the engine cutting in where there’s still three or four miles of claimed EV range remaining.
Apparently it’s to do with certain thermal parameters in very cold weather but when you have so few EV miles at your disposal with which to glide silently and unobtrusively through the neighbourhood where you live, it’s slightly galling to have to make something of a racket instead, despite some battery life remaining.
If I am now sounding like a man trying to find fault so as to appear to be providing some balance for his report, you could not be more correct. Because the truth is that, so far at least, the Artura has delivered point by point on the promise of its impressive on-paper specification and I’ve not even really delved into what it’s like to drive yet. I shall do that next time around.
Photography by Olgun Kordal
