McLaren Automotive is to merge with the start-up company Forseven in a bombshell move that will enable McLaren to expand beyond making mid-engined supercars for the first time.
The move secures the future of McLaren, giving it the capital, technology and resources to go into areas of the market it has not been able to finance itself.
Forseven is a British start-up that has been quietly assembling a team of more than 700 industry professionals, among them big-name designers, engineers and executives from rival British car companies, and has been building towards the launch of a range of luxury models under a new brand.
The common link between the two companies is the Abu Dhabi government-backed investment company CYVN Holdings, which has facilitated a merger operating under the McLaren Automotive name that will enable the models in development at Forseven to come to market under the McLaren badge.
This gives Forseven a shortcut to market, and McLaren the expansion and security it craves and the ability to better compete with the likes of Ferrari, Lamborghini, Aston Martin and Bentley.
The official announcement confirms an Autocar story from February, which revealed a merger was being planned between McLaren Automotive and Forseven to enable McLaren to expand beyond its range of supercars.
The new combined company, McLaren Group Holdings, will be led by Forseven CEO Nick Collins who – in his only interview with an automotive title – told Autocar that “we’re about to embark on the most exciting British automotive story in decades”.
Collins was previously a senior engineer at Ford and latterly JLR, where he oversaw the likes of the Defender and Range Rover.
The Forseven name had never been intended as a customer-facing brand, and will cease to exist.
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Yeah, what we all need - more luxury vehicles!!! I may be wrong, but isn't all the big money in companies like Toyota? People aren't buying new cars - and there's a reason why.
I care about McLaren and long for the company to succeed. But McLaren really is a case study in how to miss-manage a brand. McLaren reminds me of the Star Wars franchise. The original, the gold standard in the genre (quite literally in the engine bay). But with every new release the brand seems somehow lessened. You have the mirrored removal of the great founders, George and Ron. The Skywalker Ranch, see the McLaren Technical Centre. Before McLaren became a volume carmaker I remember seeing brand value charts with McLaren sat at the top. Yet, on release of the original 12c, at the time, the mood was it was lukewarm, somewhat anodyne, didn’t stir the soul like a Ferrari. (That was sort of missing the point.) The original 12c was McLaren’s Phantom Menace (though outside the F1, I think it’s their best looking car by far). McLaren responded by redesigning the front end and upping the engine db; changing the original 12c design ethos so the headlight graphic mirrored the McLaren logo. I’ve always felt McLaren has never recovered from this redesign. It seemed a gimmicky design language that until recently all subsequent cars have carried. It left the company looking uncertain and without a true aesthetic philosophy. The McLaren swoosh logo is really only a letter mark that evolved from McLaren’s sponsorship deal with Marlborough in the 80s. It looks great as a letter mark in combination with the name. But as a standalone graphic it’s bland. Nowhere on the original F1 is this logo isolated away from the name. The principles of the original F1 were a supercar that you could drive to work everyday. This seemed to be the guiding aesthetic principles behind the original 12c. But after the redesign, McLaren has never seemed aesthetically cohesive. The engineering department, on the other hand, seems totally aligned. So much so that McLaren feels like an engineer led company. No bad thing, but, whatever the ratios of form and function should be, for the type of product, the balance has never seemed right. The volume company has never had a defined sense of style. ‘A’ style. Don’t get me wrong, the 720S is a tremendous achievement. lovely silhoette. But I can’t love it. No matter how I try. I found the Senna to be the ugliest car of the past 10, 20 years. A shocker, no matter how McLaren's paint department tried to hide it. (And the nomenclature. So many unmemorable numbers. Too many cars) McLaren is a British car company with New Zealand routes owned by Saudi’s. But McLaren doesn’t feel like a British car company. There somehow feels no linage to any of the companies glorious achievements. McLaren doesn’t nest itself within an aesthetic world the way an exotic brand requires. You have to create this fantasy world. Like Star Wars. What is McLaren’s fantasy world? What does it look like. What does McLaren evoke? It conjures up Dubai. As a volume car company, McLaren didn’t exist before oligarch money. So, outside of the original, we can never remember the brand romantically. In the 1990s, at the corner of South Street and Park Lane, there was a showroom displaying a single silver McLaren F1. It was the coolest thing in the world.