Hybrids and holidays: McLaren set for race against time
McLaren boss Mike Flewitt could be forgiven for being more than a little fed up with surprise announcements.
It’s no easy feat to completely reconfigure the launch of your latest supercar when Europe’s flagship motor show is cancelled with barely three days before the curtain comes up, but that’s what McLaren was forced to do after coronavirus put paid to the Geneva Motor Show.
And that came after the curveball Boris Johnson threw at the UK car industry at the beginning of February, when the Prime Minister announced the ban on selling new petrol, diesel and hybrid cars would be brought forward from 2040 to 2035.
While climate groups welcomed the move as much-needed evidence of Boris Johnson’s “defining year of
climate action” ahead of the Glasgow-hosted United Nations climate summit in November, it left some car manufacturers, McLaren included, distinctly unimpressed.
“It was completely out of the blue”, says Flewitt. “I’m not sure whether it was a lack of understanding or whether it was intended to shock the industry, but what it has done is made the industry say ‘Hey, we need to talk about this’.”
The real issue, at least as far as Flewitt is concerned, lies with extending the ban to hybrids — a move that the McLaren boss says will have the opposite effect on the aim of reducing emissions: “I think hybrids have got a role to play in the transition between the combustion engine and pure EV [electric vehicle]. I don’t think it’s an overnight switch in 12 or 15 years’ time.
“Right now, plug-in hybrids offer the market a lower emission solution. To take that away and suggest we’re going to go straight from internal combustion to full EV could have a negative impact on emissions”.
McLaren, it is fair to say, has skin in this game: in 2019, the firm announced that it would fully hybridise its entire line-up of models by 2024. However, alarm over the government’s announcement is widespread, with industry associations the AA and the SMMT both agreeing that including hybrids in the ban could be “counterproductive”.
SMMT boss Mike Hawes says that achieving the goal would need more than just additional industry investment. “This is about market transformation. If the UK is to lead the global zero emissions agenda, we need a competitive marketplace and a competitive business environment to encourage manufacturers to sell and build here.”
What the industry needs to see, Flewitt says, is a plan. “The government has got a responsibility here around infrastructure and the supply chain. It needs to be more pragmatic.
“We will have a higher percentage of EVs, but I’d like to see a more reasonable timeline for moving away from hybrids. We need time to respond.”
Today’s Budget is likely to be a key test of the government’s commitment to its new EV plans. The SMMT has gone as far as to call for the total removal of VAT on all models, including hybrids, in a bid to encourage more people to buy them.
In addition, the motor industry group has highlighted the lack of clarity over the future of the plug-in car grant — which it calls the “most significant driver of EV uptake” — as another potential barrier to entry for many consumers, with the UK’s charging network still far behind where it needs to be to support an automotive revolution of this scale.
So will McLaren be making a swift transition to developing an EV model in light of the moving goalposts? Not until it can develop one that is superior to the rest of its line-up, Flewitt says, although he is keen to stress that McLaren can hit whatever target date the government throws at it.
One thing is for sure: something will have to change, Flewitt insists. “Even though it was weak last year, there were still 2.3m vehicles sold in the UK. It’s hard to imagine the capability to do that in 12 years time with a pure EV structure.”