I visited the McLaren Technology Centre in Woking on Wednesday morning to see the assembly line and the P1. Luckily, the timing was good, as I saw the first customer cars coming off of the newly-opened P1 line. I also followed a prototype P1 from a Woking road into the MTC, and witnessed some final prepping of a P1 as it drove around the factory floor. Finally, saw an F1 GTR, which was pretty sweet.
Biggest takeaways for me:
About the P1 itself:
Overall, interestingly, I was more impressed by the MTC itself than by the P1 in person. I'm sure it'll be a great car, but I'm not at all sold that it'll be $1.3M great. Perhaps that last sentence will be fairly useless for those of you for whom money is no concern. But IMO, I'd likely rather enjoy a 458 at a quarter the price.
I'm keeping my deposit alive, but am on the fence.
Biggest takeaways for me:
- It's interesting how the philosophy of manufacturing, in a company, can imbue its entire facilities design. Almost all of the assembly areas in MTC have shiny, white-tiled floors. Impeccably clean. Felt like science fiction throughout. Like the end of 2001: Space Odyssey.
- They put their designers directly on the floor above the engineers that assemble the designed parts. This makes for tighter feedback loops.
- The production values behind "revealing" the P1 were quite high. I guess at some level it all makes sense. But I nearly laughed out loud when the thumping techno music video ended with the P1 being revealed from behind an automated, sliding wall.
About the P1 itself:
- It's more beautiful in person than in photos, IMO.
- It's smaller than I thought.
- It's fascinating the types of things that are possible when money is less of an object, from a design-freedom perspective. For instance, the number of individual curves on the car are extraordinary compared to any mass-produced car simply because of the processes they can afford to use (e.g. hand-laid carbon weave instead of stamped metal). Or the titanium hood and exhaust pieces for maximum heat resistance. (Even the Diablo I owned had a hood-warpage problem due to engine/exhaust heat).
- The amount of carbon fiber used is nuts.
- The sunroof/skylight is nice. Tiny feature in a such a car, but nice.
- The rear carbon fiber diffuser is going to be impossible to keep chip-free. The Diablo's rear was hard enough to keep nice, even though it sloped quickly up away from the rear tires. But the P1's are basically going to be chipped to nastiness pretty quickly if you drive the car much at all -- it's too low, perhaps just a mere two inches from the rear tire. It's the type of thing that shows well, I'm sure, if you're a collector; but my Diablo was a DD, and let me tell you, the rear of the P1 will likely look pretty nastily worn within months of ownership.
Overall, interestingly, I was more impressed by the MTC itself than by the P1 in person. I'm sure it'll be a great car, but I'm not at all sold that it'll be $1.3M great. Perhaps that last sentence will be fairly useless for those of you for whom money is no concern. But IMO, I'd likely rather enjoy a 458 at a quarter the price.
I'm keeping my deposit alive, but am on the fence.