McLaren make some nice cars, I still misses my 12C.
The last 10 years or so was a boom period for expensive sports cars McLaren certainly was in the right place to take advantage of that.
They made good enough sports cars to compete, but they got greedy. Initially things were fine and the cheap money was everywhere, they can get away with pumping out a new variant every 18 months or so and not care about retaining the value of their used car market like Ferrari did.
Buyers didn't quite care too, losing 100k going from 12C to 650? Sure. They just want the latest and greatest. Oh there is a 675? I will take that too. 720? Why not!! Yeah I will grab the 765 also pls.
Things look rosy on the McLaren's balance sheet for a while, their sales are growing triple digit rate. Somehow everyone there went brain dead and forgot these kind of growth cannot be sustained. Especially not in the 200k bracket.
At least they have 'some' common sense to release the 540/570 variants for the lower pricing bracket to keep the growth going. But the problem is that the 12C platform is really good, so even the entry level cars are uncomfortably close in performance with their bread and butter car, the 650 series. There was no point in paying the premium to go for the 650 series.
Here comes the 720 variant to maintain the performance distance. But also move the product line even higher in pricing. It was an amazing automobile by it's own right, so sales figures are satisfactory initially. Buyers still didn't quite care none of the previous models held any value in the re-sale market, money is cheap.
They are literally blowing up their own bubble that's waiting to be burst.
They had their own warning sign years ago. When they released the P1, they couldn't sell out the planned production and had to cut the production target. Even with all the free money, the world isn't big enough to absorb 918 918, 500 LaFerrari and 500 P1, P1 numbers had to be cut down to 375. The McLaren name simply doesn't pull as much as Ferrari and Porsche.
But even with the lowered production number, the P1 was a fantastic profit bringer to McLaren, rough estimate puts the profit per car at close to a million each.
McLaren got a taste of the fat profit from 'limited' production cars and start cranking them out. First come the 500 675LT, at a much lower price point than the P1, they had no trouble selling those out. Another big fat bucket of money to the balance sheet. How about another 500 675 in Spider version? All gone also. These 1000 cars cost very little over their regular 650 series cars to produced.
The strategy of copying Porsche's 911 series, amortizing the same platform to create many variants seems to be working perfectly, even the engine development and gearbox are amortized the same way, from their entry level car al the way to their halo P1.
They found their cash cow. Or so they think. They had plans to release many many new 'variants' aka new products to fill in the bubble they had created. After all why not? The world is filled with free money and those free money is the air that's inside their bubble.
Here comes the Senna. Still sort of on the same platform, but now quite a bit modified from the original one. Word was that the car was initially designed to go racing under the Hypercar rule. When that plan fell through, they copied Porsche again, monetized the incomplete project, like how Porsche did it with the Carrera GT program. 500 was to be made and sold. It was announced that the car was sold out, but in reality, there are these odd car or 2 arriving at dealerships unsold. My own dealer had one of these 'sold' unsold car. earlier.
Now McLaren factory was suppose to be operated under the build to order model, every car on the line is supposed to be a 'sold' car. That should have been a sound business model. In reality, that isn't the case. A lot of the cars are actually 'sold' to dealers, with an arrangement that payment will only be made when the car is actually sold 'sold'. Not a problem before when everyone and their cousin is spending money. Not anymore.
Didn't help that their F1 team wasn't doing well, and on top there is no racing yet this year so money isn't coming in from the other arm either.
There is no easy fix for McLaren. Their product plays in an arena that's sensitive to world economics, it expands and contracts solely based on how the world is doing, they are just toys, it's the first thing people cut when in crunch time.
They wanted to be Ferrari, be 'exclusive' and can command high prices, but also wanted to be Porsche with the volume. Doesn't work that way. Porsche can do what they do because they have SUVs to subsidize the 'toys'. But then again Porsche's 'toys' aren't playing in that expensive and selective bracket.
No one can survive selling just sports cars like Ferrari, even they needed to sell a lot of merchandizing and licensing stuff, on top of what the F1 team brings in.
Their state of the art factory was expensive and haven't been fully paid for yet, and would be too costly to only produce small number of cars, but cutting their expansion ambition and shrink down to a boutique manufacturer might be the only way for them to stay afloat as a sports car only manufacturer.
As the saying goes, there are only so many people spending money, if they are buying something else, they are not buying yours. They needed to find ways to make their product attractive in this changing market place or find an alternate source of revenue. Porsche did that successfully, perhaps they needed to copy Porsche again in order to survive.
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