MIKE FLEWITT The Car Guy
WITH ANNUAL SALES OF MCLARENS NOW NUDGING 5,000, THE COMPANY’S CEO, MIKE FLEWITT, TALKS ABOUT THE BRITISH MANUFACTURER’S MISSION TO BUILD THE WORLD’S BEST SUPERCARS — AND WHERE IT GOES FROM HERE — WITH JON WALL
As befits the boss of McLaren Automotive, the astoundingly successful British manufacturer of supercars, Mike Flewitt is what’s known as a “car guy”. His career in the automotive industry, which spans more than three decades, included lengthy stints at RollsRoyce, Ford and the former racing and tuning operation TWR, before he arrived at McLaren as COO of its fledgling road-car business in 2012. Promoted to CEO the following year, the Liverpool-born Flewitt has presided over the company’s ascent into the ranks of the most respected motor companies in the world, a feat all the more remarkable for the fact that McLaren Automotive sold its first production car less than eight years ago and remains a relatively niche player.
Based in an impressive Foster + Partners-designed facility some 50 kilometres from Central London, McLaren has bucked industry trends by remaining small, profitable and independent – last year it sold slightly fewer than 5,000 cars, which represents an almost 44 percent increase over 2017. Utilising common architectures for both chassis and power units ( respectively a carbon-fibre monocell and a mid-mounted 3.8- or 4-litre turbocharged V8 engine), these are built in three distinct series – Sports, Super and Ultimate – at prices that range from around US$190,000 to as much as $2.5 million.
When he’s not running a business, Flewitt and his Swedish wife – who also happens to be an accomplished automotive engineer – relax by racing historic Lotus Elans, the classic, lightweight British ’ 60s sportscar created by Colin Chapman, who along with Kiwi car racer and designer Bruce McLaren is one of Flewitt’s heroes. He also
travels extensively and during a recent visit to Hong Kong, when he opened McLaren’s new showroom, Flewitt also found the time to chat about the company, its cars and the future – which, as he reveals here, includes the introduction of an entirely new line of GT cars very soon.
How is a McLaren different from other supercars?
We set out to build great supercars and the thing that underlines everything we do is that we try to build the best driver’s car, genuinely and without compromise. We don’t let aesthetics, fashion or even technology compromise that objective – the technology’s there to make it a better driver’s car, it’s not there as a statement of technology. We think that they’re the best driver’s cars in their class. What tends to mark out our customer base is that they’re largely enthusiasts, people who like motorsport and who like technology. They love driving – it isn’t a lifestyle purchase, it’s because they love those intrinsic elements of the car.
How has McLaren managed to succeed when other companies have struggled?
The [road-car] company launched out of the motorsport business, and our first sales were, I think, in June 2011. Then in 2013 we took stock of where we were and redefined our plan going forward, which was to create a volume of around 5,000 cars a year. That would give us the scale and the returns to continue to invest, to be independent and to spend money on new technology so we can keep on renewing the product – and to keep the product pretty exclusive as well, so we can command the price and position and so on, because this could never be a volume market for us – it has to be an exclusive one.
We also looked at the products, so we now have this threetier range, which we need to command that market and achieve that volume. Since then, what we’ve been doing is looking at the marketplace and populating it with vehicles that we believe will be exciting for our customers. We always want to put cars in segments where we’re going to be the best in class, so we won’t evolve into sectors where frankly we’re not going to be. Loads of times I’m asked, “Why don’t you guys build SUVs?” But frankly that’s not consistent with the brand and it isn’t what our customer base is after. The world is full of SUVs – there are people doing superb SUVs – so why would I wake up one morning and think we could design a better SUV than Porsche or Range Rover? It would be arrogant to think we could.
Mind you, if you’d suggested to Porsche 25 years ago that they were going to build SUVs they’d probably have thrown you out the door. But what are they now? They’re an SUV manufacturer that makes some sportscars.
Last year Porsche did about 250,000 cars of which about 60,000 were sportscars, but they did sportscars for 50 or 60 years before that – so my flippant answer to that is, “Ask me again in 50 years!” No, we’re focussed on the kind of cars that we make and because the market nowadays is very much a global one we sell the same cars in China as we sell on the East and West coast of the US, in the Middle East and in Europe. We’ve got a global market and the opportunity for global demand, so we’ll go out and build very focussed cars that are targeted at being absolutely the best in their class, however small that class is.
So you won’t build an SUV. But will we see McLaren moving into other niches?
We’ve got a car coming this year, which I describe as a GT. If you look at the way we’ve evolved, we’ve definitely moved towards a more driver- and maybe even slightly trackfocussed orientation, which left an opportunity for a car that’s for the road rather than the track. So we’ve developed a car that will still be the most sporting and most McLarenesque GT in the market – because that’s our place, it’s got to be a driver’s car – but it won’t be track-focussed. And you’ll get to see that before too long. If we built an SUV, that would be stretching the brand, but this is developing the brand and it still plays to our strengths.
It’s ironic that McLaren Automotive arrived almost at the point when people were saying, “Oh, we
“THIS COULD NEVER BE A VOLUME MARKET FOR US — IT HAS TO BE EXCLUSIVE”
don’t want to drive cars any more, we want our cars to drive us.”
I think these are fundamentally different markets. I don’t want to sound flippant, but we’re not in the transportation business, we’re in the entertainment business. I was driven here in a minivan this morning – that could just as easily have been an EV or autonomous vehicle. But when I get up at 4am on a Sunday morning to go driving or I want to go to a track, I’ll be driving a supercar. I think we’ll find the transportation market evolving and grasping technology that will be more efficient, whether environmentally or in terms of time or convenience or whatever. Taxis could be autonomous for all we care, but that’s a different market from ours. For McLaren, full driverless capability is irrelevant.
Will there be autonomous McLarens?
There’ll be autonomous capability. We see opportunities in areas like braking, cruise-control systems, lane-departure and all of these aspects that make the car safer – and potentially autonomous capability in certain environments, such as city driving. But for us it’s about how you apply that opportunity – and it will always be about driving pleasure. We’re only trying to sell around 5,000 cars a year in a global car market of more than 80 million, and there are enough people who love cars and love driving.
What about the internal-combustion engine? Does it have a future?
It does have a future. We’re in a world where about 2 percent of the cars are electric and 98 percent have internalcombustion engines, but that will change over time to become completely the opposite. We’re going to go through a period of hybrids – by 2025 McLaren will probably be 100 percent hybrid. And hybrid power is great, because it enhances the characteristics of the internal-combustion engine. Full EV for us will only come if we can build a better supercar with EV. We’re very much a niche proposition, an enthusiast’s proposition – people will still want that.
One problem with electric power, of course, is the weight of the battery.
The McLaren Senna weighs 1,200kg; we calculated that as a hybrid and for the same power and range, that car would weigh 2 tonnes. That’s crackers, but it’s changing. In 2013 we launched the P1 and in 2020 we’ll sell the first Speedtail. The battery in the Speedtail is half the weight of the P1 battery. So in that time it’s already moved a long way. It’s still nowhere near where we want it, but at some point it will become a viable proposition. Our challenge then will be: let’s say we’ve got a fully viable battery, but is the car exciting? Sound quality, vibration – I mean “nice” vibration – emotion: those will be the challenges.