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Time to configure your McLaren 650S

If you're like us, Friday afternoons are the bane of your existence - the freedom of the weekend is so close you can taste the beer and see the red of your TV's Netflix logo, but the minutes that stand in your way slip by with all the speed of a retreating glacier. You need a way of burning that time, and as it turns out, online supercar configurators are just the answer. Lucky for you, this Friday brings a new one, with the McLaren 650S coupe and convertible available for building. As high-end configurators go, this is a good one. There's a big picture of the car and a wealth of customization options to play with. Like a lot of configurators this one doesn't display prices, although with the hardtop McLaren middle child rumored to crest $318,000, does it really matter? Hop over to McLaren's page and get cracking – those minutes aren't moving any faster. Related Gallery McLaren 650S View 10 Photos Related Gallery McLaren 650S Spider View 10 Photos News Source: McLarenTip: Sean McLaren Car Buying Convertible Coupe Performance configurator mclaren 650s build your own mclaren 650s spider

The UK votes for Brexit and it will impact automakers

It's the first morning after the United Kingdom voted for what's become known as Brexit – that is, to leave the European Union and its tariff-free internal market. Now begins a two-year process in which the UK will have to negotiate with the rest of the EU trading bloc, which is its largest export market, about many things. One of them may be tariffs, and that could severely impact any automaker that builds cars in the UK. This doesn't just mean companies that you think of as British, like Mini and Jaguar. Both of those automakers are owned by foreign companies, incidentally. Mini and Rolls-Royce are owned by BMW, Jaguar and Land Rover by Tata Motors of India, and Bentley by the VW Group. Many other automakers produce cars in the UK for sale within that country and also export to the EU. Tariffs could damage the profits of each of these companies, and perhaps cause them to shift manufacturing out of the UK, significantly damaging the country's resurgent manufacturing industry. Autonews Europe dug up some interesting numbers on that last point. Nissan, the country's second-largest auto producer, builds 475k or so cars in the UK but the vast majority are sent abroad. Toyota built 190k cars last year in Britain, of which 75 percent went to the EU and just 10 percent were sold in the country. Investors are skittish at the news. The value of the pound sterling has plummeted by 8 percent as of this writing, at one point yesterday reaching levels not seen since 1985. Shares at Tata Motors, which counts Jaguar and Land Rover as bright jewels in its portfolio, were off by nearly 12 percent according to Autonews Europe. So what happens next? No one's terribly sure, although the feeling seems to be that the jilted EU will impost tariffs of up to 10 percent on UK exports. It's likely that the UK will reciprocate, and thus it'll be more expensive to buy a European-made car in the UK. Both situations will likely negatively affect the country, as both production of new cars and sales to UK consumers will both fall. Evercore Automotive Research figures the combined damage will be roughly $9b in lost profits to automakers, and an as-of-yet unquantified impact on auto production jobs. Perhaps the EU's leaders in Brussels will be in a better mood in two years, and the process won't devolve into a trade war. In the immediate wake of the Brexit vote, though, the mood is grim, the EU leadership is angry, and investors are spooked.

McLaren says it 'is a sports car brand' and won't make SUVs

You can add McLaren to the list of luxury and sports car companies to say it will not build an SUV, the automaker's CEO Mike Flewitt telling Bloomberg, "We need to remain very focused. McLaren is a sports car brand and that's exactly what we're going to remain." In spite of those words, in order to save his voice, Flewitt should get business cards made printed with that response, since the question will certainly keep being asked. And if the coming Lamborghini and Bentley SUVs do well, observers will expect Flewitt's ideas on the subject to "evolve," no matter what he or Ron Dennis says publicly. The evolution we refer to has taken place at BMW, which was never going to make a M version of its SUVs, and Porsche, which said it wouldn't make an SUV smaller than the Cayenne. Furthermore, there's Rolls-Royce, whose CEO said the company hadn't even considered an SUV because it wouldn't fit the brand's values, meanwhile rumors abounded that the company was gauging customer reaction to a sketch of a concept SUV adorned with the Spirit of Ecstasy. And five months later that same CEO said the company was "intesively thinking" about building one. Those are but few and recent examples. If McLaren doesn't waver, it will join Ferrari as the only pure-sports car company holdouts. Featured Gallery 2015 McLaren P1: First Drive View 39 Photos News Source: BloombergImage Credit: Copyright 2014 AOL McLaren Performance Mike Flewitt