Shulou(Shulou.com)11/24 Report--

CTOnews.com, October 16 (Xinhua) McLaren is developing "a family car". In a recent interview with OUTLETS Motor UK, McLaren's new CEO Michael Leiters confirmed that the brand is looking to expand its product portfolio into new areas with the aim of generating more revenue. Leiters also strongly hinted that McLaren's "family car" would be all-electric.

McLaren CEO said that with today's lithium-ion battery technology, he does not want to build an all-electric supercar because it is too heavy and less maneuverable than the internal combustion engine or hybrid McLaren. However, an electric SUV or "limousine" will be feasible because the handling will be less important, and it can still become very powerful.

"I can [do it], but it's not a persuasive product because it's too heavy. The [impressive] longitudinal acceleration of battery cars is not a problem: you can do this in a limousine or a SUV with 1000KW [power]."

In addition, Leiters stressed the importance of software in electric vehicles.

"for electric vehicles, it is more important to have connected cars and good control systems to give full play to the full potential of electric motors."

Although Leiters has never explicitly confirmed that SUV is under development, it can be assumed that this is what he means by "family car". After all, Leiters worked for Ferrari before joining McLaren, and his last project was Purosangue. Before Ferrari, Leiters was a project manager at Porsche, where he helped develop Cayenne.

CTOnews.com learned that from a financial point of view, "Super SUV" means a lot to McLaren. Other supercar brands have been hugely successful in launching SUV. The Lamborghini Urus, for example, recently became the Italian brand's best-selling model of all time, selling 20,000 vehicles since 2018. This is an impressive figure when considering that the Lamborghini Urus starts at more than $230000 (about 1.658 million yuan). Similarly, almost half of all Aston Martin sold last year were DBX models. Given McLaren's continuing financial difficulties, it was a wise decision to build and launch an SUV.

Welcome to subscribe "Shulou Technology Information " to get latest news, interesting things and hot topics in the IT industry, and controls the hottest and latest Internet news, technology news and IT industry trends.