After going through a lot of bad luck over the last three years, McLaren is getting ready for a comeback. More than $1 billion was lost by the company that made the famous F1 and P1 hypercars in 2023 because of poor sales, and it didn’t have a CEO during a crucial time in the global pandemic. Now that McLaren has new ownership and company leadership, it should be easy for the troubled supercar maker to start making money again. The best way to do this is with a new SUV, of course. McLaren’s new CEO, Michael Leiters, won’t say in public that the company is making an SUV for a number of reasons, starting with Mike Flewitt’s promise that the company would never make an SUV. In a talk with Road & Track, Leiters said that McLaren is working on a “shared performance vehicle,” or SPV. McLaren’s family car will be less of a “sport utility” and more of a “shared utility,” performance, or anything else. It will be built on a base from an unknown partner. This is a classic move by a company that makes supercars but doesn’t want to accept that it needs an SUV to make money and keep making the cars it is best known for Road & Track says that McLaren lost more than $500,000 on each of the 2,137 supercars it sold in 2023. As Leiters says, “We want to become a sustainable company,” which is why the new SPV is so important for McLaren to get back to making great machines. It was created based on the current market niche, which is supercars and ultimate cars. That’s the main problem we have.” Aston Martin, Ferrari, and Lamborghini can all confirm that SUVs make a lot more money than supercars. This is the reason why the DBX, Purosangue, and Urus came out. Leiters tells R&T that they think there is a second stage, which is to grow their product line beyond the segment they are in now so that the business can reach its full potential. Our term for sharing a show with more people than a McLaren can hold is “shared performance.” If many versions are made, the McLaren SPV will probably be a plug-in hybrid that was made with the help of a partner by combining a McLaren “powertrain into an existing platform,” as Leiters put it. This is the end of a lot of expensive development work. It will save McLaren even more money because it can use the new SPV’s base with a powertrain from the Artura or the soon-to-be-replaced 750S. In other words, the “shared” type could have either a plug-in V8 or a hybrid twin-turbo V6 engine. Road & Track says that BMW could be a partner. If McLaren picks the XM powertrain, the SPV could be built on top of it, which is BMW’s current V8 PHEV platform. Leiters then said, “McLaren supercars are known for being very light.” If BMW M Division and McLaren worked together, they could make a lighter plug-in hybrid SUV by cutting down on mass. The light SPV costs about $400,000, according to reports. There is a war fund at McLaren for the money you would have saved, which will be used to build the “first EV supercar.” It has to come out of the woods first, though, and McLaren thinks that the SUV/SPV is the best answer.
