A few years ago, it seemed like every supercar company was confronting the “Should we or shouldn’t we?” conundrum on full electrification – and actually concluding that the answer was “We have to!” But now one major player, McLaren, says that it’s going to take its sweet time. Here’s what CEO Nick Collins told The Drive:
“China’s moving rapidly towards EVs, and the U.S. isn’t. Europe and [the] UK are currently in different spaces. And let’s see if those spaces they’re currently in hold the test of time as well. Unmistakably, internal combustion is going to play the majority role of this brand for a really long period of time.”
He then added that while McLaren hasn’t ruled out an EV, the company isn’t in a rush. That’s an interesting position to take because as The Drive reported, Collins used to run an EV startup called Forseven, which merged with McLaren earlier this year. And it was a sort of inside-baseball merger: McLaren is owned by CYVN Holdings, an investment arm of the government of Abu Dhabi, and CYVN Holdings also owned Forseven. Speculation at the time of merger suggested that the Forseven project could yield an electrified McLaren, building on chatter from 2024 when CYVN, which also has a stake in Nio, acquired McLaren from Bahrain’s sovereign wealth fund. (To make things even more complicated, CYVN and the Bahrain fund just jointly acquired full ownership McLaren Racing, the F1 operation.)
The markets are dictating the pace of supercar EV development
The main concern among the supercar brands in the face of the EV transition was whether their incredibly sophisticated internal-combustion powertrains were going to be regulated into going-extinct dinosaur status. But with regulations being rapidly rolled back in the U.S., executives at high-performance carmakers have been granted a reprieve. It actually now makes better business sense to adopt, at the very least, a wait-and-see attitude.
In some respects, this is bad news for enthusiasts. Mass-market EVs are increasingly optimized for versatility and range, and while they are typically EV-quick across the board, there’s definitely an opening for fully electric and gas-electric hybrids that can deliver driving thrills thanks to lightweight construction, supercar aerodynamics, and small batteries (all at a price, to be sure). Some gearheads were looking forward to what McLaren, known for stupendous engine design, might come up with when it turned its engineering prowess to pure EVs.
Good news for McLaren’s survival
Obviously, McLaren has been passed around quite a bit of late as an asset, and that asset has been distressed. It was a money-loser at significant scale for Bahrain, and the path to restored financial vigor doesn’t necessarily run through launching very expensive full-on EVs into an uncertain market. As The Drive duly noted, McLaren is adding EV technology to its vehicles, in the process keeping up with its peers without overdoing anything. Let us also not forget that they know their trade, with the legendary P1 serving as the definitive example of an early hybridized hypercar.
Politics is making things difficult for the global auto industry, but supercar companies have a certain ability to keep themselves out of the fray. Plus, I think we all kind of expected combustion supercars to stick around for a while, even if the rest of the industry had moved toward EVs as aggressively as we thought just a couple of years ago. Still, although McLaren builds brilliant machines, we were all perhaps a bit worried about the brand, given that it lacked the aura of Ferrari and Lamborghini to get it through the valley of radical change. Collins now sees a chance to guide McLaren – slowly – through that dangerous territory, and he’s wisely grabbing it.
