Under new ownership and leadership, British supercar maker McLaren is looking to forge a path to profitability in desperate times. With sluggish sales and falling revenue, the brand reported staggering losses amounting to £873 million, or $1.1 billion.
However, the path that the 'new McLaren' will take will require breaking a promise made by its previous leadership, seeking to enter a profitable segment in which its contemporaries have already left their mark.
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in a interview with Carretera y Pista, McLaren's new CEO, Michael Leiters, revealed in a very complicated way that the brand is getting into SUVs; a radical change from the point of view of his predecessor Mike Flewitt. Instead of calling the new SUV an SUV, Leiters poetically called the new vehicle a “shared performance vehicle,” emphasizing that the 'P' in SPV stands for “performance.”
“To unlock our full potential as a company, we believe there is a second stage,” Leiters told Road and Track. “Expand and expand our line beyond the segment we are in today. “We’ve called this ‘shared performance’ because you can share the performance with more people than you can in a McLaren today.”
'Dilute the brand'
in a interview with automotive news In 2018, former McLaren CEO Mike Flewitt made it clear that the Woking, UK-based carmaker was not going to jump on the 'high-end SUV bandwagon' that included Lamborghini, Rolls -Royce and Bentley.
Although he says he doesn't hate SUVs, such a car is “simply not what McLaren does,” noting that such a car would dilute the brand and require too much investment to develop.
“When we decide to make a product, there are three simple tests: it has to be right for the brand and for the customer base, we have to have the technology to make the best car in its class and we have to make money,” Flewitt said.
“An SUV starts to reduce the purity of the brand as a supercar brand for the driver. Secondly, we don't have the technology. Can you imagine from the beginning if we wanted to go out and make a car better than a Range Rover? or a Cayenne? : the billions we would have to invest? Thirdly, therefore, we would not make money, so it does not meet any requirements.
In response to these concerns, Leiters revealed an action plan for R&T that could help accelerate the development process of such a model.
Leiters said the “smart way” to create such a car is through a technology partnership with a third-party manufacturer. However, he notes that the brand should be careful not to “lose anything that is fundamental to McLaren and our brand DNA” in the process.
McLaren's new boss noted that the SPV will be a plug-in hybrid built with a partner and will integrate a McLaren “powertrain” into an existing platform, which could save billions in development costs if they had ventured down the road alone. . In addition, McLaren plans to use an engine from one of its supercars under the hood of the future SPV; either the Artura plug-in hybrid V6 or the plug-in V8 that is set to power the replacement for the stunning 750S.
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Road and Track noted that McLaren has been in talks with BMW as a potential partner, which could see the Woking-based carmaker insert its engine using underpinnings from BMW's XM plug-in hybrid SUV.
But no matter who the partner is, the new CEO says it won't be an engineering job similar to the Porsche Cayenne or Lamborghini Urus; SUVs that share platforms with the Volkswagen Touareg and the Audi Q7 and Q8.
Leiters reiterates that the future SPV will be solely a McLaren, noting that it will “feature high levels of custom content” and may even incorporate structural changes to make it lighter.
“The main attribute of a McLaren is light weight,” Leiters said. “We have world-class competence that we could bring into a partnership, even talking about structural elements of a platform.”
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Although the expected price of the McLaren SPV will be around $400,000, selling a high-volume car will be very necessary if it wants to continue creating the barrier-breaking performance supercars it is known for.
According to R&T, the company lost more than half a million dollars on each of the 2,137 cars it sold worldwide in 2023. Although supercars remain the core of the brand, Leiters acknowledges that it needs to increase profits to survive.
Selling SUVs is one way to breed them. Although fast and low supercars are nice to look at, they can only attract a very small number of customers. SUVs can expand the reach of a specific brand to a wide range of buyers attracted by the prestige of a particular name and badge, which translates into sales.
Lamborghini said in a statementthat “the year 2023 was the best ever” for the brand, noting that it operated with a “record operating margin of 27.2%.”
For the first time, Lamborghini delivered more than 10,000 cars to customers around the world, of which more than 60% were Urus SUVs. Also, Aston Martin Year-end results 2023 They show that of the 6,620 vehicles it sold worldwide, 2,939 were DBX SUVs, while in 2022 the model represented more than half of its sales.
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