McLaren looks beyond cars with new £40m facility
Company is gearing up to a future without Formula One, with the health care and aerospace industries in its sights.
McLaren, maker of championship-winning Formula One cars and £650,000 road-going "hyper" cars, has made a £780m bet that it can cut it in mainstream manufacturing.
Such is the company's confidence that it claims that the setting up of an all-new British car company is only the tip of its ambition. Even before its new car factory is finished, McLaren is already working with the healthcare and sports industries and has set its sights on aerospace.
But McLaren says it sees the 12C, the two-seater sports car at the heart of the £780m investment, as a "standard bearer" for expanding into other areas of manufacturing. The ultimate aim is to keep the company going if or when Formula One comes to an end.
McLaren has spent some £40m on a new production facility next to its glass-and-steel headquarters in Woking, both of which were designed by Norman Foster.
It now has 1,000 employees, 500 of whom work for McLaren Automotive, the road car company, and will hire another 300 technicians and production engineers for the new facility when it opens in 2011.
In contrast with mass-production car factories, McLaren's new facility will have no robots and very little automation other than a conveyor belt for bringing the cars through the heat process in the paint shop. The cars will be hand-sprayed.
"It's part of our manufacturing philosophy, the hand-built craftsmanship and personal pride," said Alan Foster, operations director.
There is more to McLaren's decision to keep heavy machinery to a minimum than its principles, he says. It gives the company flexibility in what it can use the factory to build. A new car, or derivative of a model, is planned every year for the next five years, and Mr Foster is thinking beyond that. "I don't know what a car looks like in 15 years time," he said. "It could be electric, it could be anything."
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