AUGUST 20, 2018 19 At left: A worker joins a carbon-fi ber tub to a vehicle chassis. Above: McLaren engines await new homes. At right: A team brings a chassis, powertrain and body together. How to make a SUPERCAR ukarkaria@crain.com M Urvaksh Karkaria 4.5 million variations. McLaren builds cars as they are ordered. T at means the pro- duction line could have a 540C followed by a 720S followed by a 570S Spider. cLaren Automotive builds its high-dollar supercars in an unusual building in bucolic southern England. “Robots are incredibly good at doing the same thing over and over and over,” said McLaren, daughter of company founder and Formula One driver Bruce McLaren.
“It would be very hard for them to cope with the variety on our production line.” Unlike the typical sprawl- ing auto plant that can be seen for miles, the McLaren Production Center is partially underground. T e two-story, 371,354-square-foot building is part of a Norman Foster-designed campus that includes McLaren’s glass-walled, semicircular headquar- ters building and a lake. T e lake is not just for aesthetics — the water is used to cool the building and an on-site wind tun- nel used for r&d. Above: Body shells are prepared to be hand- painted. At left: A McLaren Senna awaits rear bodywork. Below: A McLaren Senna sits on the factory fl oor. At bottom:
Vehicles receive end-of-the-line quality checks. All parts in a McLaren are sourced from suppliers with the Woking plant handling assembly. All vehicles are hand-painted. Every McLaren starts out as a 175-pound car- bon-fi ber tub, made by Mubea Carbo Tech of Salzburg, Austria. Mc- Laren will bring tub pro- duction in-house once it opens its Sheffi eld, Eng- land, plant next year. T e fi rst thing one no- tices on entering the cavernous production center, accessible via tunnel, is the lack of whirring robots and conveyor belts typi- cally associated with auto manufacturing.
The VIP entrance to the McLaren Production Center “All cars start off as a spider (convertible), and then we bond the roof structure on if we want a coupe,” Mc- Laren said. T e plant operates in two shifts with a daily production capacity of about 20 cars. Over about 15 days, a 570 will move through more than 50 stations on a wheeled trolley, where wiring, powertrain and the interior are added. Employees work at stations on multiple cars, rather than following the same car through as- sembly. McLaren’s Sports Series and Super Series models follow the same line through the building. T e $1 million fl agship Senna model gets its own special line.
a “When [former CEO] Ron Dennis fi rst thought of the technology center, he wanted a building that would showcase McLaren — very calm, very quiet, very effi cient, very fo- cused,” brand ambassador Amanda McLar- en told Automotive News during a tour of the plant in Woking, England. “T is building is based on those same principles.” Automation is not ideal for McLaren’s highly custom, low-volume manufactur- ing. Super Series models alone have about