Good morning! It’s Tuesday, July 18, 2023 and this is The Morning Shift, your daily roundup of the top automotive headlines from around the world, in one place. Here are the important stories you need to know.
Top Gear America Sneak Peek: Dax Drives a McLaren 765LT
1st Gear: McLaren’s Rebuilding Phase
McLaren’s been doing its share of soul searching over the past few years, sustaining every manner of financial setback; forging ahead on the launch of its newest car in years in the face of production hurdles; and even being lured by a few corporate suitors. But McLaren’s still McLaren — still independent and still looking to diversify its offerings one day, because that’s where the money is today. The problem is that takes time, as new CEO Michael Leiters reminded Autocar during an interview at the Goodwood Festival of Speed: “If we are on the right road for profitability, we will think about extension across all segments. We call it ‘shared performance’. Shared performance could be everything which has more than two doors and/or more than two seats.
‘This is something we will think about later. We didn’t make a decision on that. It’s definitely a business opportunity for us. But I don’t see that in the near future. If you consider what I said – recapitalisation and then going to profitability plus the development time [of the car] – this won’t be before 2028.”
The focus now is on restructuring, according to the chief executive. While some 500 Arturas have been delivered to date, Leiters doesn’t consider the car’s production and supply chain as robust as it needs to be right now. The company is churning those cars out slowly, to avoid further quality setbacks for customers. The company also isn’t rushing to full EVs, as Leiters says its clients aren’t asking for that yet. For now, it’s just Artura and 750S, all the time:
These two models will be McLaren’s core range until the proposed 2028 expansion, and Leiters believes that the firm can still grow in the supercar market, not necessarily through volume but with increased pricing and “more specials”. On future electric models in its supercar range, Leieters [sic] said there were three pillars to the firm’s line-up and future plans: pure internal combustion engined models, hybrids and EVs. The 750S and Artura sit in the first two pillars respectively, with Leiter saying he expects hybrids to make up 90% of McLaren volumes in five years.
On EVS, he said the firm “did not want to do a car weighing 2000kg and with 2000bhp as anyone can do that” and instead if it was to launch an electric car it would have to be “comparable to a 750S weight wise”. He added: “We are working on concepts and have really exciting ideas around that, and if in time it is there it has to outperform what we can do with ICE.”
Whatever the future brings for McLaren (read: SUVs and full battery-electrics) the British automaker isn’t desperate to get there before the product is ready. That sounds good — so long as it can afford to wait that long.
2nd Gear: Wait, They Don’t Love You Like I Love You
No way I wasn’t talking about Apple’s and Google’s navigation apps and not making a Yeah Yeah Yeahs reference. Anyway, it took 11 years and plenty of jokes at Tim Cook’s expense, but it seems Apple has finally convinced some people to not to immediately rush to the App Store and download Google Maps the second they boot up their shiny new iPhone for the first time. The Wall Street Journal has the story, with a few interviews with some Apple Maps converts:
Now, according to customers and user-experience analysts, [Apple] has [fixed Maps]. Some users are finding reasons to switch to Apple Maps, including its clear public transit directions and its visually appealing design.
While Apple might not need the app to sell any more iPhones, the company’s lofty ambitions with cars and augmented-reality headsets depend on maps people actually like using.
“Maps has come a long way, and people have noticed,” Craig Federighi, Apple’s head of software, said during the company’s 2020 Worldwide Developers Conference.
I’ll come clean here: Since I moved back from Android to iPhone in 2020, I’ve had only Apple Maps on my device, for the exact reason that the article goes into here:
The biggest competitive advantage Apple Maps has over Google is its deeper integration in the iPhone. Any iOS service that requires directions—from finding restaurants in Yelp to locating AirTags in Find My—uses Apple Maps. Users can’t change that.
“People are inherently lazy and form habits around default options,” says Peter Ramsey, a user-experience consultant who has written about design differences between Apple and Google Maps. “For a long time Apple Maps was so bad that people proactively switched to Google Maps, but as the experience of Apple Maps improved, there was less incentive to make that default-breaking action.”
Apple Maps is more deeply integrated across iOS, and deleting it in favor of Google Maps breaks a lot of integration and behaviors. That said, my reluctance to use the same app all my friends and family use instead has definitely come back to bite me. Back in the spring, I was meeting my friend at a brewery with two locations: one in Philadelphia and one in a suburb outside Philly. (Shout out Tired Hands!) The one in the city was much newer and not yet visible on Apple Maps. You can only imagine the phone call that ensued as we tried to find each other 15 miles apart.
3rd Gear: A ‘Sharper And More Focused’ BRZ Is Coming
Back to cars. We all love the Subaru BRZ, as we love its Toyota counterpart. Subaru has teased “a sharper and more focused” take on its beloved rear-wheel-drive coupe that will debut at its Subiefest California event next week. That’s all the information we have at this stage. Well, that and this image:
Image: Subaru
What could this new BRZ be? The cynic in me says it’s yet another STI-inspired concept that Subaru has absolutely zero intention to put into production, because that’s what Subaru does: identify key ways to make everyone happy and itself a ton of money and not take them. But my guess — and I know nothing, I promise — is that this will be some kind of performance trim featuring the Brembo brakes and Sachs dampers that the GR86 is also getting as an option for 2024. We’ll see on July 23. A true rear wing would be pretty rad though, just saying.
4th Gear: JB’s BEV Backfit Business
Tesla co-founder JB Straubel is on the cusp of raising a lot of money for his battery recycling startup that could fund a plant in Nevada, according to a report from the Financial Times:
Tesla co-founder JB Straubel’s battery recycling start-up is in talks to raise $700mn in a deal that would value it at almost $5bn and help fund the company’s first major plant in Nevada.
Straubel established Redwood Materials in 2017 to reshape the supply chain for electric vehicles by recycling the materials in batteries and reducing the need to mine for more of the minerals the industry needs.
Since it was founded, Redwood has been backed by major investors including asset managers T Rowe Price, Baillie Gifford and Fidelity. Several of its existing investors are set to participate in its new fundraising, according to people familiar with the matter.
After raising $700mn at a $3.7bn valuation in 2021, Redwood earlier this year received a conditional commitment for a $2bn loan from the US Department of Energy.
The loan is intended to help finance Redwood’s development of a battery recycling facility near Reno, Nevada, which will turn end-of-life battery and production scrap into critical materials for use in electric vehicles.
Should the plant reach full capacity, it’s projected to be able to build batteries to support the manufacturing of one million EVs annually. Straubel recently returned to Tesla as a board member, to the delight of investors and seemingly less so Elon Musk.
Reverse: Apollo 11
On this day in 1969, 54 years ago…
Neutral: Stay Cool Out There
Thinking of our readers in the southwest and also continental Europe, where shit’s been untenably hot for some time already and is only continuing on that trend.