As car people know, McLaren is mostly a racing car company.
However, the company does sell about 5000 cars a year globally, and now it’s working on an aggressive plan to retool its lineup for the electric vehicle age.
Nick Carey reports at Reuters on the newest wrinkle in something called the Track 22 plan that McLaren showed off at forums like the Geneva Motor Show in past years, updated for 2021 and beyond.
The current plan involves 18 new car models by 2025, and a full electric vehicle as part of an Ultimate Series that McLaren hopes will boost sales.
Sneak peaks at this new electric vehicle show over 300 miles of range, and stunning style with a build that doesn’t sacrifice performance.
“McLaren could probably produce a fully-electric vehicle tomorrow, said Ruth Nic Aoidh, the British carmaker’s executive director for purchasing,” Carey writes. “But the weight of today’s batteries ‘would kill all of the attributes that make a McLaren a McLaren.’ So instead, Nic Aoidh says McLaren is taking more time to rethink the way it builds vehicles from the wheels up. It is also looking to overhaul its business model, to generate revenue from selling some of its new technology to other automakers.”
As Carey points out, McLaren and other companies face the challenge of pivoting quickly, as world governments look at making gasoline combustion vehicles illegal due to concerns about global warming.
That’s going to be hard for a company that laid off over a quarter of its staff, shedding 1200 jobs last year. McLaren also faces an uphill battle due to a smaller scale production model than those of big companies like GM and Tata, which have been working on their own electric vehicle designs for quite a while.
So what’s next for “petrolheads,” as they might call them at McLaren’s Woking plant in England?
We’ll see as the auto industry quickly converges on new electric and self driving vehicle designs in one of the hottest tech sectors around. If you have holdings in automotive technology, be sure to keep learning about the market context in order to make strategic plays.