McLaren Automotive occasionally delivered cars with quality issues to its customers in the past, the company’s new CEO, Michael Leiters, told Evo in an interview. He added it would never be allowed to happen again.
Leiters – who is an engineer and an M.D. – had previously worked for Porsche and served as Ferrari CTO until the end of 2021. He headed the street-legal car division of McLaren in July 2022, replacing Mark Flewitt.
In the interview, he stressed that he never had enough time to assess the activity of the company properly prior to his appointment, so it wasn’t until later that he learned about certain controversial moments.
Among other things, employees told him that McLaren Automotive used to approve of unfinished projects, greenlighting cars for production and delivery before all issues could be sorted out. The first production model to have avoided this fate was the McLaren Artura (featured in the media section here). It was first shown last February, but has been postponed multiple times since. When Leiters realized there were still issues with the technology, he halted the shipments at once.
In the company’s financial report for Q3 2022, though, it admits that the Artura project continues to be plagued with issues. In order to eliminate them, the automaker even had to sell off a part of its own car collection to its major stakeholder.