2019 Mclaren 600lt on 2040-cars

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McLaren just built its 20,000th car since its road car revival in 2011

Nearly two and a half years ago we wrote a story about McLaren building its 10,000th vehicle since its reentry into the road car market. Today, McLaren built its 20,000th vehicle (a 600LT Spider in Chicane Grey) since its revival. For a bit of perspective, it took the British supercar maker a little over five years to build the first 10,000 cars. Now it has managed to build the same amount of cars in half the time. This doesn't exactly come as a surprise, as McLaren has far more models now than when it started with only the MP4-12C in 2011. Even as McLaren truly takes up its place as a "high-volume" supercar manufacturer, it's still smaller than Ferrari and Lamborghini. The prancing horse managed to move 9,251 cars in 2018, while McLaren built just 4,806. Lamborghini did slightly better at 5,750 cars. This doesn't seem to bother McLaren much, as it says it plans to keep output at approximately 5,000 cars per year into the next decade. A small increase to 6,000 cars per year is expected as the company executes its "Track25" plan to introduce more models. Every one of the McLarens built since 2011 has been assembled at the company's production center in Woking, Surrey. McLaren credits part of the sharp increase in production to the addition of a second shift at the manufacturing center, implemented in 2016. We completely expect McLaren to remain lower-volume than Ferrari and Lamborghini in the coming years, especially as those two companies venture into the world of SUVs. The Urus is already out, and Ferrari's performance crossover will likely add even more volume. McLaren has repeatedly said it has no intention of getting into the SUV market.

McLaren 675LT is already sold out

You wouldn't associate McLaren with doing things slowly, but we didn't anticipate how fast it would sell out of the 675LT. The British racing team turned exotic automaker revealed the 675LT as a longer, more hardcore version of the 650S at the Geneva Motor Show this past March. At the time it announced that only 500 examples would be made. Now just two months later, McLaren spokesman Wayne Bruce confirmed to Autoblog that the entire production run has already sold out. "Around half the buyers" who placed their orders for the 675LT, Bruce tells us, "are new to the brand." The other half, by extension, are existing McLaren customers who already own (or have owned) a 12C, 650S or P1. The 675LT sits in the company's new Super Series alongside the aforementioned 650S and the more accessible Asian-market 625C. With 666 horsepower on tap from McLaren's signature 3.8-liter twin-turbo V8, the Longtail will rocket to 62 in under three seconds en route to a top speed of 205 miles per hour. It comes exclusively in fixed-roof-coupe form and retails for GBP259,500. That's equivalent to about $400,000 at current exchange rates, and comes out to about the same (in either currency) as what Lamborghini charges for an Aventador. Related Video:

McLaren, unlike Ferrari or Lamborghini, won't build an SUV

Lamborghini now has one, and Ferrari says it will introduce one by late 2019 or 2020. But don't expect McLaren to taint its supercar DNA by giving into the temptation to tap into the hot-selling sport utility vehicle segment. "I'm not the first person to point out an SUV is neither particularly sporty or utilitarian," McLaren's chief designer, Dan Parry-Williams, told Top Gear. "It's not 'everything for a reason,' unless the reason is to clutter up the streets," referring to a McLaren design mantra ("everything for a reason", a nod to minimalism and purposefulness in the company's cars). In other words, they're not going to build one since it doesn't fit with the mission of the company: to build ultra high-performance sportscars. Lamborghini showed off its new Urus SUV at an event on the sidelines of the Detroit auto show earlier this week, making for its first presence at the Detroit auto show in several years. It'll start at $200,000. Meanwhile, Ferrari CEO Sergio Marchionne said at the auto show Tuesday that the Italian brand will make not only a battery-electric supercar without peer, but also its first SUV, which will be the "fastest on the market" when it arrives in late 2019 or 2020, according to Bloomberg. McLaren has already said that it aims to increase production, invest GBP1 billion (about $1.38 billion at current exchange rates) and expand its product portfolio, saying that half of its new models will be hybrids by 2022. It's also talked about making a fully electric powertrain for a future Ultimate Series model based on the hybrid P1. Just don't plan on any of them sitting on a new SUV platform — for now, at least.Related Video: This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Image Credit: Drew Phillips McLaren SUV Hybrid Performance supercar mclaren p1 hypercar Sport Utility