Enlarge / The peloton passing through a sunflowers field during the stage eight of the 110th Tour de France in 2023. (credit: David Ramos/Getty Images)

Most readers probably did not anticipate seeing a Tour de France preview on Ars Technica, but here we are. Cycling is a huge passion of mine and several other staffers, and this year, a ton of intrigue surrounds the race, which has a fantastic route. So we're here to spread Tour fever.

The three-week race starts Saturday, paradoxically in the Italian region of Tuscany. Usually, there is a dominant rider, or at most two, and a clear sense of who is likely to win the demanding race. But this year, due to rider schedules, a terrible crash in early April, and new contenders, there is more uncertainty than usual. A solid case could be made for at least four riders to win this year's Tour de France.

For people who aren't fans of pro road cycling—which has to be at least 99 percent of the United States—there's a great series on Netflix called Unchained to help get you up to speed. The second season, just released, covers last year's Tour de France and introduces you to most of the protagonists in the forthcoming edition. If this article sparks your interest, I recommend checking it out.

Enlarge / The introduction of model year 2025 brings a retractable hard-top option for the McLaren Artura, plus a host of other upgrades. (credit: McLaren)

MONACO—The idea of an "entry-level" supercar might sound like a contradiction in terms, but every car company's range has to start somewhere, and in McLaren's case, that's the Artura. When Ars first tested this mid-engined plug-in hybrid in 2022, It was only available as a coupe. But for those who prefer things al fresco, the British automaker has now given you that option with the addition of the Artura Spider.

The Artura represented a step forward for McLaren. There's a brand-new carbon fiber chassis tub, an advanced electronic architecture (with a handful of domain controllers that replace the dozens of individual ECUs you might find in some of its other models), and a highly capable hybrid powertrain that combines a twin-turbo V6 gasoline engine with an axial flux electric motor.

More power, faster shifts

For model year 2025 and the launch of the $273,800 Spider version, the engineering team at McLaren have given it a spruce-up, despite only being a couple of years old. Overall power output has increased by 19 hp (14 kW) thanks to new engine maps for the V6, which now has a bit more surge from 4,000 rpm all the way to the 8,500 rpm redline. Our test car was fitted with the new sports exhaust, which isn't obnoxiously loud. It makes some interesting noises as you lift the throttle in the middle of the rev range, but like most turbo engines, it's not particularly mellifluous.

Enlarge (credit: Tenways)

I enjoyed riding the Tenways CGO800S far more once I stopped thinking of it as a bike, and more like the e-bike version of a reasonable four-door sedan.

It is a bike, to be sure. It has two wheels, handlebars, pedals, and a drivetrain between feet and rear cog. It's just not the kind of bike I'm used to. There are no gears to shift between, just a belt drive and five power modes. The ride is intentionally "Dutch-style" (from a Dutch company, no less), with a wide saddle and upright posture, and kept fairly smooth by suspension on the front fork. It ships with puncture-proof tires, sensible mud guards, and integrated lights. And its 350 W motor is just enough to make pedaling feel effortless, but you'll never quite feel like you're winning a race.

I also didn't feel like I was conquering the road when I was on the CGO800S so much as borrowing my aunt's car for an errand. The "Sky Blue" color helped cement the image of a modern-day Mercury Sable in my head. It's not meant for no-power riding, and its battery isn't a long-hauler, with a stated 53-mile range. It's comfortable, it's capable, and maybe we've long since reached the stage of the e-bike market where some bikes are just capital-F Fine, instead of them all being quirky experiments.

Enlarge / Polestar's first electric SUV is the new Polestar 3, and it's rather great to drive. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

MADRID, Spain—2024 is a big year for Polestar. It was spun out of Volvo in 2017 as a standalone performance electric brand, and in 2019, we tried its first car, a low-volume plug-in hybrid GT that wowed us but only ever amounted to 1,500 cars. Next came the Polestar 2, a compact four-door sedan that was one of the first cars to deeply integrate Google's automotive services. But now it's time for the cars most of Polestar's potential customers have been waiting for—SUVs. And it's starting with the $73,400 Polestar 3.

Although Volvo has sold its shares in Polestar (leaving its parent company Geely as Polestar's sole corporate parent), the two companies will continue to share technology and platforms. The Polestar 3 is built on the group's SPA2 architecture, which is also being used by the forthcoming Volvo EX90; indeed, both are going into production at Volvo's factory in South Carolina this year.

As a measure of how far the company has come in a relatively short time, the Polestar 3 generates less carbon emissions during production than the smaller, cheaper Polestar 2 when it was introduced in 2020.

Enlarge / The R1S and R1T don't look much different from the electric trucks we drove in 2022, but under the skin, there have been a lot of changes. (credit: Rivian)

In rainy Seattle this week, Rivian unveiled what it's calling the "Second Generation" of its R1 line with a suite of mostly under-the-hood software and hardware updates that increase range, power, and efficiency while simultaneously lowering the cost of production for the company. While it's common for automotive manufacturers to do some light refreshes after about four model years, Rivian has almost completely retooled the underpinnings of its popular R1S SUV and R1T pickup just two years after the vehicles made their debut.

"Overdelivering on the product is one of our core values," Wassym Bensaid, the chief software officer at Rivian, told a select group of journalists at the event on Monday night, "and customer feedback has been one of the key inspirations for us."

For these updates, Rivian changed more than half the hardware components in the R1 platform, retooled its drive units to offer new tri- and quad-motor options (with more horsepower), updated the suspension tuning, deleted 1.6 miles (2.6 km) of wiring, reduced the number of ECUs, increased the number of cameras and sensors around the vehicle, changed the battery packs, and added some visual options that better aligned with customizations that owners were making to their vehicles, among other things. Rivian is also leaning harder into AI and ML tools with the aim of bringing limited hands-free driver-assistance systems to their owners toward the end of the year.