Battery tech isn’t advanced enough, says boss

McLaren's CEO has queried the logic of making electric supercars at this moment in time.

Boss Michael Leiters says in an interview with The Times that to manufacture them at the moment actually creates more emissions than building an internal combustion engine.

The owners then don’t put in enough miles to recover those extra emissions, because they use them as low-mileage vehicles, only notching up some 5,000 miles a year.

‘It doesn’t make sense today to have that for a supercar. It is too heavy. I don’t want to make a sports car, a supercar, which weighs 2,000 kilogrammes or 2,200 kilogrammes,’

‘A supercar is light. If we do an electric supercar, it will be light. It should be around 750 [kilogrammes] weight. It shouldn’t be two tonnes. Two tonnes is an SUV.’

Leiters reckons there might be progress by the start of the 2030s, with a government ban on new petrol and diesel cars is set to come into force in 2030, with a ban on hybrids to follow in 2035.

However, he added: ‘But if somebody is saying today, “We will ban [petrol and diesels] in 2030”, for somebody like us it will be very, very challenging to bring out a customer-relevant proposition for a supercar.’

McLaren has one hybrid model available at the moment, which is the Artura (pictured), but despite being a ‘big fan’ of electric cars, Leiters reckons battery technology isn’t good enough at the moment for an all-electric McLaren.