McLaren has unveiled its new carbon fibre chassis that will form the basis of all new cars leaving the Woking manufacturing plant in the near future. The new architecture is designed to accommodate new hybrid and electrified powertrains and has been engineered, developed and produced in-house in the UK at McLaren’s £50m state-of-the-art McLaren Composites Technology Centre (MCTC) in the Sheffield region.
McLaren, arguably one of the leading purveyors of weight-saving, claim that the new carbon technology uses world-first processes and techniques to strip out excess mass, reduce overall vehicle weight, while also further improving safety attributes.
“The new ground-breaking vehicle architecture is every bit as revolutionary as the Monocell chassis we introduced with the company’s first car, the 12C, when we first embarked on making production vehicles a decade ago.
“This new, ultra-lightweight carbon fibre chassis boasts greater structural integrity and higher levels of quality than ever before with our new MCTC facility quickly becoming recognised as a global centre of excellence in composite materials science and manufacturing,” says Mike Flewitt, CEO of McLaren Automotive.
According to McLaren, the first of its hybrid supercars will arrive as early as 2021, while the firm states that its new chassis will also allow it to produce 100 per cent electric supercars in the future.
Flewitt said: ““For us, light-weighting and electrification go hand-in-hand to achieve better performance as well as more efficient vehicles.”
It is understood that McLaren will focus its attention on the entry-level Sports Series range, with the replacement for the existing 570S pegged to be one of the first models to receive this new hybrid powertrain.
Keyword: McLaren unveils new lightweight architecture that will host hybrid-power in future vehicles