McLaren will go all-hybrid by 2025 -- and it aims to launch 18 “new models or derivatives” within the same time frame. That’s news out of the Goodwood Festival of Speed, which has lately come to rival top auto shows in terms of generating interesting enthusiast-oriented news. McLaren also used the platform to confirm, once again, that there’s an “Ultimate Series” P1 hypercar successor on the way and to state that it aims to build up to 6,000 vehicles per year by the middle of the next decade.
But the hybridization news is the biggest deal here. According to the automaker, “True to the spirit of pushing the boundaries of technology to benefit drivers, McLaren will also evaluate new augmented driving features and help develop a lighter, superfast-charging, high-power battery system for performance applications that is expected to have over 30 minutes of electric range around a racetrack.”
What all that means in practice remains to be seen. We’re not exactly sure why you’d want a car that can do 30 minutes of on-track driving without popping out of electric vehicle mode -- unless, of course, it’s the fastest way around, or the neighbors get fussy about exhaust noise after a certain time of day. But that target spec is a good indication that McLaren is going for real, usable electric-only range in its future vehicles.
This could come in handy as more and more cities try to eliminate internal combustion within their boundaries, but we imagine (and hope) it will provide a tangible performance benefit as well.
Of all the supercar manufacturers to commit to full hybridization, McLaren might be the one that has us the least concerned. McLaren explored the technology in the P1, and everyone seemed to think that worked out just fine, thank you, so the move isn’t wholly unprecedented. And frankly, while the turbocharged V8s present across all of the automaker’s current offerings get the job done (with no shortage of gusto), they’re not the most soulful powerplants on the planet. McLaren has always built techy cars, so we're willing to see where they go with this.
Further, McLaren reiterated its commitment to the “weight race,” which would see it fighting to shave mass off its cars to increase performance and responsiveness, rather than simply dialing up horsepower. The bare-bones Senna weighs something like 2,880 pounds; as composite technology -- something McLaren has decades of experience with -- continues to advance, we hope to see numbers that make the automaker’s latest track weapon look porky.
That means more horsepower per pound, which will ultimately matter more than than whether that power comes from an internal combustion engine, batteries or some punchy combination of the two.
