INTERVIEW
McLaren toys with EVs, but ‘can’t find a way to do it’ — yet
But it’s struggling to make its silent sizzler a better sports car
Electric vehicles (EV) might have the headline numbers in straight-line sprints, but most of the world’s exotic car makers have yet to turn them into supercars. It’s not for want of trying and among them is McLaren. The British supercar maker has been secretly working with a pure battery-electric vehicle (BEV) test supercar for more than 18 months and expects to make a full electric-powered supercar or hypercar. But, its CEO Mike Flewitt recently revealed, it doesn’t know when that might be. "EV is a tricky one. We do have an EV mule car," Flewitt says. "We are working with it not so much on the powertrain but to ascertain whether an EV can have the same emotional characteristics that a car we use today can. "The answer at the moment is that we can’t find a way to do it, so we are going to keep working at it," he says. McLaren’s only dabble with electrification was with the P1 hypercar in 2012. That car ran a 542kW/720Nm twin-turbo V8 boosted by a Kers-style 131kW/ 260Nm electric mo...
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