McLaren: SUV will be an Urus and DBX rival, not Purosangue

“Urus is definitely a competitor. DBX definitely. Purosangue I’m not sure,” says McLaren Automotive’s COO Michael Straughan as he gives us our best steer yet on what to expect from the Brit carmaker’s upcoming SUV.

“The Ferrari concept is very different to the rest of the competitive set. Wait until you see the styling of it [the McLaren on stilts] and then you can comment.”

We’re waiting with bated breath over here. McLaren has been sniffing around the idea of something lifted and with rear seats for years now, but while competitors have all got theirs out the door, the folk at Woking have only now announced the investment that will help them put an SUV into production.

Though it is worth noting the £500m of cash is unrelated to the product and R&D investment that’ll be required to actually develop and build the family car.

The as-yet unnamed SUV will go on sale before the end of the decade and Straughan confirmed that it will use a hybrid powertrain. To begin with there won’t be a fully electric option as was rumoured when McLaren merged with EV startup Forseven in 2025.

“The Forseven concept was very different,” explained Straughan. “That was an electric SUV with volumes at a different level. But they had attracted some suppliers who McLaren had never worked with in the past. We were very keen on the new McLaren to see how many of those suppliers we could engage. And there's some suppliers who we hadn't really worked with in the past who were very keen to work with McLaren, which has opened up some doors we didn't expect.”

Interesting. It’s worth noting that before the merger last year, Forseven had bought a share of Chinese EV maker Nio and the whole of Gordon Murray Technologies. Wonder if tech from either of those two will figure? Perhaps that sort of detail is still a way off though, because we still don’t even know what the thing will be made from.

“There are some big decisions to make about the SUV, said Straughan. “The material is one of the biggest decisions. We're a carbon fibre manufacturer. How on earth do we progress into an SUV?

“Our DNA is carbon, but we're not committed to that at the moment because we know the challenges with a car as big as this. It would be aluminium if we couldn’t make that work.

“Whatever we do with the SUV it needs to be clearly a McLaren, and it will be. There will be a rear environment which we haven't done before, which needs to be thought about very carefully and how it applies to a very high-performance vehicle.

“Power to weight ratio has always been very important for McLaren too. I don’t think we’ll let that go ever. But obviously with an SUV it brings different attributes that are a first for us.

“It has to be ours. We have no partner that we would share this with. This is a big step for us.”

Still no word on when we’ll see the results of that step, but can McLaren stick the landing like Lamborghini did with the Urus, or are faltering DBX sales a warning sign it should take heed of?