Published on October 21, 2025

Introduction to the 2025 McLaren Artura Spider

Designed to replace McLaren’s old Sports Series cars, like the 540C and 570S, but offering the sort of performance once reserved for the top end of the Super Series (such as the 675LT and 720S), the Artura Spider sits alongside the hard-topped coupe to take Ferrari on at its own game.

Pros & cons of the 2025 McLaren Artura Spider
Pros:

• Astounding chassis
• Monumental drivetrain
• Sublime sense of theatre

Cons:

• Impractical, even for a supercar
• Inconsistent brake feel
• Needs a stronger heating fan

Exterior & design of the 2025 McLaren Artura Spider

• Dihedral doors for show-stopping appeal
• Folding hard-top roof and buttresses
• Incredibly clever aerodynamics in play

The Artura is one of McLaren’s smaller cars, measuring just beyond 4.5 metres long from tip to tail. And given the styling of all road-going McLarens since the MP4-12C has been, well… a bit ‘samey’, you might think the new hybrid model wouldn’t have much impact. We’ve seen slim taillights, high-set twin exhausts and curved headlamp clusters before, right?

Except this car attracts attention (all positive) from other road users like no other. And well it might, because when you drink in the attention-to-detail and fuss-free craftsmanship of its body, you suddenly realise what a spectacular-looking thing it is.

Cab-forward in the best supercar style, as per the original Honda NSX and the Pagani Zonda, the Artura Spider has a long tail that is topped by remarkable glass-and-carbon-fibre buttresses that flow back from the top of the car’s roof.

Sitting on a gorgeous set of ten-spoke, super-lightweight, ‘Star’ design forged alloy wheels in a Dark Stealth diamond-cut, and with McLaren Orange brake callipers peeping out from behind them, this is a machine which can stop all traffic within a 100-metre radius of its position with consummate ease.

What’s even better about the Artura Spider’s form is that it is notably free of loads of excessive aero-related addenda, but don’t for a second think it has no aerodynamic capabilities.

In fact, there is tonnes of clever work going on at the back, in terms of the ducting and venting and flow and so on, to ensure that superheated gases escaping from the Artura’s signature ‘chimney’ (the gold-coloured, mesh-covered aperture on top of the McLaren’s engine cover that leads straight from the car’s two turbos) are not either trapped in the engine bay, nor are they flowing straight over the upper lip of its tail and melting all the expensive paint from its form.

Even the exterior door handles are formed into an angular shape, so that they don’t introduce turbulence into the Artura’s massive side-pod intakes.

We were told this is arguably the most advanced car, from a thermo-aerodynamic perspective, that McLaren has ever put out on the road, and we’re not going to argue with the company on that score.

The story of the exterior isn’t even finished there, because the McLaren has further party tricks up its sleeve. Like the smooth yet mesmeric folding of its hard-top roof (here enhanced with an optional electrochromic glazed panel in its upper panel) that is incredibly quiet in operation and which raises and lowers very quickly – even on the move at speeds of up to 50km/h. This is common for cars with soft fabric lids, but not so easy to do with metal-and-glass like this.

And then, of course, there’s the proper supercar majesty of a set of dihedral doors, which open upwards. We can’t fault the looks of the McLaren Artura Spider. It’s all glorious form and function combining for a thoroughly dramatic whole, and we – and many other people, judging by reactions to the car during our test drive – adore it.

Dimensions of the 2025 McLaren Artura Spider

Length: 4,539mm
Width: 1,976mm (mirrors folded)
Height: 1,193mm
Wheelbase: 2,640mm

Paint colours for the 2025 McLaren Artura Spider

There are two colours in the Racing Inspired range for the McLaren Artura Spider, then five in Standard, 20 in Elite and 18 in McLaren Special Operations (MSO). The colour of our test car, Tempest Blue, is an Elite colour and therefore a robust four-figure option, but it’s new for 2025 and looks superb on the frame of the Artura open-top.

Other hues include vivid yellows, oranges and greens, to really make the most of the McLaren’s arresting appearance, but there’s a good range of finishes available that should satisfy all customers’ tastes.

And if there’s not a shade you like in the 45 outlined above, then you can presumably pay MSO an exorbitant fee and have your Macca in any colour you like under the sun.

Interior, tech & comfort of the 2025 McLaren Artura Spider

• Superb switchgear and paddle shifts
• Some slight finishing bugbears
• Not the most practical, even by supercar standards

Inside the McLaren Artura Spider is a cabin that has plenty of special flourishes that remind you you’re in something top-end, but also, it’s quite simplistic and pared-back, as you’d expect of a car focused on the thrill of driving before all else.

Some of the switchgear, for instance, is fantastic, like the quartet of scalloped metal column stalks and the weighty, satisfying-to-use paddle shifts. We also like the conceit of putting the Handling and Powertrain mode rocker switches up on the top of the instrument binnacle, so they are in reach of your fingertips while you’re holding the button-free steering wheel – in itself something of a work of art in the modern motoring era for its minimalist visual glory.

However, in our almost-new test example, there were a few areas where the finishing could do with a little attention, like A-pillar trims which didn’t quite align properly and a wavy line of piped stitching on the passenger-side dashboard.

We’re probably being very pernickety there, by even mentioning these things, but at this lofty end of the automotive market, buyers are tough-to-please customers, and the quality control has to be absolutely spot on.

Nevertheless, overall, especially in the luscious Nappa leather finished in tan of our example, the cabin proves worthy of living up to the promise of the car’s striking exterior appearance.

Getting comfortable in the driver’s seat

Getting into the McLaren is a little bit of a faff, given the way the sills of the Artura’s carbon tub are situated – they cut in quite noticeably to the front, rendering the two pedals somewhat offset in the driver’s footwell – but it’s not the most difficult car for ingress and egress, even with its roof in situ.

Once inside, the seat adjusts electrically and can be manoeuvred into a proper supercar bum-on-the-floor position, although McLaren always places the seat controls right to the front of the outer side of the seat’s base bolster.

They’re put there because with the doors closed, there’s not enough room for your hand to slide down to the side of the seat if the controls were further back, but it still takes some getting used to.

Meanwhile, the ten-inch digital instrument cluster moves with the electrically adjustable steering column, so that the information it displays is always visible to the driver, which is a neat touch.

Final note: there are memory seats in the Artura Spider, but as soon as you open the driver’s door, the seat whirrs backwards to allow for easier exit and entry from and into the car. When you climb back in, the seat won’t automatically readjust to your favoured position, though.

Luckily, there’s a helpful shortcut in that if you pull the lower-left column stalk (which ordinarily controls the trip computer display) before firing the car up, the seat will revert to the last saved settings.

Infotainment and technology

The cluster display is crisp and nicely configurable, showing useful information controlled by a lower column stalk and switching graphics as you cycle the Artura through its different chassis/drivetrain modes.

Alongside is the McLaren Infotainment System II (MIS II) in the form of an eight-inch touchscreen mounted low on the dash and angled towards the driver.

This is not bad, but it’s not brilliant either, and almost every ancillary in the Artura is run through it – including the climate controls. It quickly becomes quite intuitive to use if you keep cycling through it and prodding at various menus, but it’s not resetting any technological parameters for the interface in vehicles.

The last few things to point out here begin with a wireless charging slot at the very front of the McLaren’s central tunnel, with a rubberised clamp at the bottom to hold your phone in place while driving because it’s an almost vertical arrangement. This works very well in practice.

And this Artura was also fitted with a superb Bowers & Wilkins stereo, whose attractive door speakers were ringed with ovals of ambient lighting at night, although this is a pricey optional extra.

Practicality

No two-door, mid-engined supercar is what you’d call practical, but the McLaren seems to be behind a few of its key competitors, nonetheless.

The door pockets are OK and have a shaped ‘floor’, so that anything in them doesn’t immediately fire forwards out of the pocket when you open the dihedral door to get out.

In the centre console, there’s a narrow storage space with a couple of USB sockets and there’s also a solitary cupholder just behind the gear selector pads on the tunnel, but there’s no glovebox at all and precious little room to put anything else.

Meanwhile the ‘boot’, mounted at the front of the Spider, is probably big enough for two large holdalls or one sizeable suitcase, but in our test car it also had the bag for the charging cable, a fire extinguisher and sundry other items within it, which cut down on the relatively meagre 160 litres of space.

In other words, as phenomenal as the driving experience is in the Artura, it’s not exactly a car you could realistically go grand touring in, should you want to.

The Artura also has an underpowered and sometimes-noisy heater fan, which needs to be a bit punchier to keep the car’s occupants warm when motoring top-down in cooler weather.

Performance of the 2025 McLaren Artura Spider

• Blistering speed and sublime noise
• Chassis is an utter jewel
• Plug-in-hybrid for performance

The mid-engined McLaren Artura Spider is powered, in the main, by a twin-turbocharged 3.0-litre V6 engine with a ‘hot-inside-V’ formation – which means its turbos sit inside the valley of the cylinder bank.

The engine is assisted by a 95hp/225Nm electric motor mounted in the eight-speed transmission, hooked up to a lithium-ion battery with 7.4kWh of usable capacity.

All told, this drivetrain serves up colossal numbers of 700hp and 720Nm, powering a car that – even with a driver, all vital fluids and a 90 per cent fuel load onboard – weighs an admirably low 1,560kg.

This combination results in some truly startling stats: 0-100km/h takes exactly three seconds, 0-200km/h (where such a thing is legally possible) takes a mere 8.4 seconds and the car would be hitting 300km/h from a standstill in no more than 21.6 seconds, if it so happened to find itself at the end of a particularly long runway.

The top speed is also 330km/h… which McLaren says is limited, suggesting the Artura is capable of more.

And yet the battery is sufficient to allow for a claimed 33km of all-electric driving, in turn yielding official numbers of 4.8 litres/100km (58.9mpg) and a CO2 emissions of just 108g/km – about the same as a particularly clean petrol-powered city car.

Driving the 2025 McLaren Artura Spider

There’s no other way of putting this: the McLaren Artura Spider is sensational. Completely fabulous. It serves up a driving experience that feels, with the best possible intentions, like driving a really big Lotus (but one of the good ones, before electrification)… only it’s a Lotus with the sort of power, speed and glittering roadholding ability to destroy Lamborghinis and Ferraris.

There’s nothing about the powertrain we’d change. We don’t know how you want us to phrase it, but it almost becomes redundant to say that the Artura is fast with an all-capitalised deleted expletive.

Even on half-throttle openings in Comfort mode, the Macca’s electric-enhanced V6 will shunt you deep into illegal-speeds territory in the blink of an eye, so you deploy full throttle in this car with extreme care.

If you do, though, you’re treated to as near as makes no difference the car version of hyperspace. With the wonderful and swift-shifting SSG as its back-up, and experiencing apparently no turbo lag (augmented by the torque infill of the electric motor, too) on a throttle which is razor sharp, the Artura is tuned to build up its power in a crescendo as it approaches the 8,000rpm-plus redline, rather than dumping all its torque in the midrange and then running out of puff as its driver futilely chases revs.

The resulting acceleration is scintillating, as is the noise. A diaphragm in the rear bulkhead of the passenger compartment accentuates the sounds of the specifically angled twin rear exhaust exits (they point as directly away from the bodywork as they can for the best possible effect), and we think the hard-edged, rasping voice of the Artura makes this the most acoustically pleasing McLaren we’ve yet driven.

Yet if the powertrain is magnificent, the chassis underpinning this all is a masterpiece. There’s not a driving situation the agile Artura Spider doesn’t excel at.

It’s even so benign and fluidly damped in its Comfort modes that it puts on a comprehensive pretence of a grand tourer, while noise suppression is also excellent (a bit of road rumble from the 295-section Pirelli P Zero Corsa rear tyres notwithstanding).

And when you add in surprisingly good visibility out of the cabin in all directions (there are no obvious blind spots in the Spider), then this car becomes a cinch to drive for long-distance cruises on the motorway, or even for low-speed ambling about town – where it is eerie as it rolls about in near silence on its electric power, if it has charge in the battery.

But always tick the box for the optional nose lift function, so that you can get the ultra-low front of the Artura raised for speed bumps and sharp inclines into car parks, thus avoiding any painful and expensive graunching incidents.

Naturally, it’s not a car you buy for its effortless ability to eat up the kilometres like a luxury saloon or for just popping into town to pick up some groceries, so it’s a joy to report that the handling is exemplary as well.

The weight and feedback of the steering, the gracefulness of the body and wheel control, and the McLaren’s willingness to get into a natural, inviting flow on the right roads all add up to make this thing so comprehensively memorable to drive.

In Sport mode, it’s a little firmer and pointier than it is in Comfort, while making louder noises from its engine and exhaust, but in Track it dials down the showiness to bring laser-like focus to every fibre of its being, in order to go as quickly as possible through any given selection of bends.

And you can use both Sport and Track on the road, too, without the McLaren becoming unbearably uncomfortable or skittish.

From a dynamic point of view, this is in the top five cars we’ve ever driven; maybe even top three.

So when we say our one observation of its kinematics is inconsistent brake-pedal feel, we again feel like we are nitpicking. It’s not that the stoppers on the Artura are bad. Far from it – they’re monster carbon-ceramic discs measuring 390mm up front and 380mm rear.

And when you do get the pedal pressure right, they can stop the car with all the effectiveness of it having seemingly hit an invisible brick wall. The official data says 200-0km/h can be achieved in just 124 metres, while 100-0km/h is done in a ridiculous 31 metres. Those figures can wholeheartedly be believed, trust us.

But because they’re carbon discs, when they’re cold they can take a good prod of the middle pedal to get going. And while the McLaren can harvest energy from its electric motor acting as a generator when you’re off the throttle, there’s apparently no regenerative effect on the brake pedal itself.

Yet sometimes we would squeeze on a bit of pressure to the left-hand pedal, and the Artura didn’t feel like it wanted to slow down that much. Release the pedal, lift and then try again, and the brakes would bite with a sudden sharpness, as if you didn’t have much finesse with the anchors. Just a little bit of pedal recalibration might sort this out, but in truth it didn’t really detract from the stellar capabilities of the Artura.

And let’s finish on an unexpected high point here. It’s not a hybrid because McLaren is trying to win fuel economy and emissions awards, but on one long 260km run down a motorway, we asked the McLaren to fully charge its battery (which it does quickly using the V6 engine) by pulling on the left-hand lower column stalk.

It still managed to achieve an overall 9.4 litres/100km (30.1mpg) in such circumstances, at fast-flowing motorway speeds. In the end, across more than 1,150km of mixed-roads testing with lots of, um, ‘enthusiastic’ driving mixed in, it recorded an average consumption figure of 11.9 litres/100km (23.8mpg). From a 700hp supercar, that’s plainly astounding.

Alternatives to the 2025 McLaren Artura Spider

• Assume around €400,000 imported
• Assured rarity value here
• One of several hybrid supercars

There are no official McLaren dealers in Ireland, so your best bet is importing one from the UK – and there’s not even anywhere that sells them in Northern Ireland.

The car we tested was about £286,000 with options, off a basic price of £221,500, so considering the lowish CO2 figure we’d estimate the Macca would be about €400,000 to bring here as specified – making it comparable with its Ferrari 296 GTS rival.

Other grandiose hybrid soft-tops, which aren’t mid-engined supercars like the McLaren, include the Bentley Continental GTC Spee , and then the obvious one – Porsche’s 911 Cabriolet.

This open-topped icon starts from a smidge beyond €225,000, but the GTS T-Hybrid, which is the principal competitor for the Artura (at least until the 700hp-plus 911 Turbo S T-Hybrid appears) is approaching €289,000 before options.

However, in the Porsche’s favour is not just the price advantage, but the fact it is officially available to buy in Ireland – you don’t need to import it from anywhere else.

Servicing the McLaren Artura Spider

The McLaren Artura Spider has an annual service interval, or every 14,500km, whichever comes first. Interestingly, the company includes a three-year service plan for the car in the purchase price, although honouring that in a country where there are no McLaren dealers or specialists may be tricky.

McLaren Artura Spider warranty

Every new McLaren Artura, Spider or otherwise, comes with a five-year, unlimited-distance warranty, as well as providing six years and 75,000km-worth of battery cover. Both of these warranties can be extended for a fee.

Verdict – is the 2025 McLaren Artura Spider a Lotto-win car?

Aside from the occasionally inconsistent brake-pedal feel, an underwhelming heater fan, a few interior finishing niggles and a relative lack of practicality, everything else about the McLaren Artura Spider is absolutely blinding.

It’s dynamically incredible, even in disciplines you might not expect (like ride comfort, rolling refinement and average fuel economy), and it also looks amazing while feeling like a million dollars to drive – even on trips where you’re simply quietly going from A to B. Is it a Lotto-win car? One hundred per cent. It should be right at the top of your dream list.

Want to know more about the 2025 McLaren Artura Spider?

If there’s anything about the new McLaren Artura Spider we’ve not covered, or you’d like help in choosing between it and other cars, you can avail of our expert advice service via the Ask Us Anything page.