McLaren Design Language Has Serious Electric Car Potential

Jun. 24, 2019 8:00 PM ET by Noah Joseph / 2 Comments

The future of McLaren could be looking very bright.

Everything McLaren makes, and has made since launching its automotive division, employs the same basic building blocks: a mid-mounted twin-turbo V8, a carbon fiber monocoque, and a dual-clutch transmission to juggle the power. But what if it didn't? What if it made something completely different – like, say, an electric vehicle?

Then it might look something like this rendering, or so we'd hope. It's the work not of McLaren's design director Rob Melville, or his predecessor Frank Stephenson, but of Daniel Platek – a budding automotive designer from London, right in McLaren's back yard.

Daniel Platek via Behance

Now if the idea of an electric McLaren supercar sounds like blasphemy to you, we'd urge you to think again. McLaren has already embraced the benefits of electrification in the P1 and Speedtail (even if it's kept the internal-combustion engine in place alongside the electric motors). So too have rivals like Porsche, Ferrari, and Koenigsegg, with Aston Martin and Mercedes-AMG soon to raise the bar even higher. And as the likes of Rimac and Pininfarina are working to establish, battery power alone can go a very long way in a supercar (or hypercar).

Daniel Platek via Behance

Does that mean Woking will start cranking out EVs in the near future? Probably not, no. At least not in the next few years. But it will in all likelihood get there one day, just like most every other automaker in the business, at whatever level of the market its products compete. And that day can't be very far off, either. Here's hoping that when it does, whatever McLaren cooks up looks as good on the road as this design does on our screens, because we like what we see so far.