It’s been more than a decade since McLaren built its first electrified speed machine, the P1. That hypercar combined a twin-turbo, 3.8-liter V8 with electric motors to make 903 horsepower way back in 2013. You might think that, in 2025, McLaren would already have a fully battery-powered model on sale, given the rapid R&D at the famously tech-forward supercar company. There is no McLaren EV, however, and according to the Woking marque’s recently installed CEO Nick Collins, it’s in no hurry to build one.
The Drive sat down with the executive for an interview, in which he also talked about Gordon Murray’s spiritual F1 successor and the idea of supercar production outside the U.K. We pressed Collins on the topic of increasing electrification, a topic that’s somehow even more polarizing now than in recent years. He’d previously mentioned that the future of McLaren would involve “multi-propulsion,” though he told us that the timeline is very much in question.
“Frankly the world’s changing at very different paces with different regulatory environments,” Collins explained. “China’s moving rapidly towards EVs, and the U.S. isn’t. Europe and U.K. are currently in different spaces. And let’s see if those spaces they’re currently in hold the test of time as well. Unmistakably, internal combustion is going to play the majority role of this brand for a really long period of time.
“Could I envision an EV at some point? Yes. Are we in a hurry to do one? No.”
Collins’ predecessor, ex-McLaren CEO Michael Leiters, told Car & Driver last summer that the manufacturer was working on a purely electric drivetrain. There have not been any public updates on that project since, and so far, McLaren hasn’t announced any sort of timeline for the technology’s rollout. Not that those timelines really mean much in today’s world, as reports swirl that rival exotic automakers like Ferrari and Lamborghini have pushed back their EV deadlines to the end of the decade, citing weak market demand.
Before taking the roles of chairman and CEO at McLaren, Collins led a luxury car startup called Forseven. That brand was merged into McLaren before ever building an actual vehicle. People assumed that Forseven’s focus was on EVs, though from what I can tell, the company never identified that as its focus. Regardless, most assumed that McLaren would gravitate toward EVs rather soon as a result, but that’s proven not to be the case.
“Our major thrust initially was to create a new British luxury brand, and it was a new British luxury brand—it wasn’t a new British EV brand,” Collins told us. “And the fact that people had said what they said about it was, well, I mean, the air of mystery that comes with a startup like that, there’s a lot of blank spaces that people will fill in on their own.”
McLaren has plenty going on with electrification as it is, even if gasoline is still part of the equation. Its Artura supercar utilizes a twin-turbo V6 as well as an axial flux electric motor, while the upcoming W1 halo car relies partially on electricity to make its 1,275 hp. It’s not like McLaren is shirking modernity or technological advances; it simply sees that worldwide regulations are drifting further out of alignment in the coming years.
At least he’s up front about it.
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From running point on new car launch coverage to editing long-form features and reviews, Caleb does some of everything at The Drive. And he really, really loves trucks.