From Supercars to Super SUVs?
McLaren is a mainstay among supercar lovers and enthusiasts worldwide. The brand attracts a certain clientele: die-hard fans who love and breathe it, whether through its cars or its motorsports efforts. We might see an SUV make the brand more profitable in the near future, and that’s just the beginning of a new era.
In an interview with Nick Collins, Car Magazine got a few statements from the McLaren boss. One statement stood out: “When we acquired McLaren last year, we really feel there’s an untapped potential with this brand.”
McLaren
Brand Cachet to Sell SUVs
Collins’ statement boils down to this: McLaren has enough brand cachet to sell SUVs that people will buy, based on this year’s news. Recently, McLaren received a capital injection from Abu Dhabi investors of about $1,689,000,000. That’s enough to sustain the brand’s racing efforts for a while, or to kick-start a new era for McLaren as a maker of road cars, not just supercars.
At this point in time, details of the new model are sparse, but we’re fairly confident it will be something akin to the Lamborghini Urus, Aston Martin DBX, or Ferrari Purosangue – speculatively speaking.
Before Collins, the brand has always pushed back on the concept of an SUV, and for good reason. McLaren makes supercars, and there’s no doubt that an SUV isn’t a supercar by any known metric. However, history proves that profitability or financial safety is but one successful SUV away — think Porsche Cayenne or Lamborghini Urus and how those two models saved their respective companies from the verge of bankruptcy.
Yup, a McLaren SUV is on the Way
For hardcore McLaren fans, the notion of the brand “selling out” by making an SUV might not sit well, but for most supercar brands in the industry, creating a somewhat “accessible” model for their customers to enjoy is a reality that most brands have to face.
The new SUV will be “done the McLaren way“, so even if it’s not going to be another supercar, it will at least have touches that signal that it’s still a McLaren. “We immediately realigned our production to the underlying demand, so there’s always more demand than there is availability,” Collins stated in his interview.
McLaren had a record sales year in 2018, when the brand achieved 4,806 sales. While that was good for the sales ledger, the finance department was pretty much begging for a savior, as those sales were unprofitable for McLaren. Prices rose from there, creating a sales deficit of 2,000 units and a cumulative loss of about $1.8 billion for the brand from 2020 to 2024.
Now under its new owners, L’IMAD, McLaren’s debts are all settled, but with a renewed goal of not just selling supercars, but finding profitability and “[acting] in the long-term interests of the business,” said Collins. I guess McLaren can only go so far on supercar sales alone, as with every other brand that already bit the SUV bullet.
AI-generated image/Autoblog
The McLaren Way
“Customers are looking for experience,” Collins said. “They want to be associated with a brand, with a family, community that goes with that experience that they love.” For now, we don’t know what the future holds for the brand’s SUV, only that it will be a hybrid and will compete with the likes of the Urus and Purosangue.
That being said, it’s unconfirmed what it will be named or its exact market positioning. Perhaps McLaren could go more upscale and make a GT-style SUV like the Bentley Bentayga, or perhaps it can try to create an SUV “the McLaren way,” which is a drive that gets close to its supercars. My money’s on the “McLaren way.”
McLaren
