McLaren Automotive First Anniversary: 1,000 McLaren MP4-12C sold and counting

McLaren Automotive is a year old and is celebrating selling over 1,000 McLaren MP4-12Cs in the first twelve months.

It’s actually a bit more than three years since Ron Dennis announced the formation of McLaren Automotive, which had a live launch on Cars UK on 18th March 2010.

But McLaren don’t seem to acknowledge that date as the start of McLaren Automotive but instead prefer the date the first MP4-12C was sold – exactly one year ago today on June 21st 2011.

In that year since the MP4-12C started to rack up sales McLaren has sold more than 1,000 – exactly as they predicted they would when McLaren Automotive was announced in 2009 – with a lot more in the pipeline thanks to the 1500 engines for the MP4-12C already built by Ricardo.

But McLaren hasn’t just racked up sales at exactly the rate they predicted, they’ve also established a global network of dealers in 22 countries, opened the McLaren Production centre to build the MP4-12C and won the ‘Best British Luxury Brand’ title

They’ve also added McLaren Special Operations for customised titivation of McLaren cars (like the McLaren MP4-12C High Sport) and debuted the 12C GT3 race car. Not exactly a quiet year in Woking then?

Now we look forward to the next production prediction made by McLaren in 2009 coming true – a rise to 4,000 cars a year by 2015.

That extra volume will come from ongoing sales of the MP4-12C and sales of the new McLaren F1 (perhaps destined to be the McLaren 799?), but the big volume is going to come from the new baby McLaren aimed at the sub-£100k market and right in the firing line of cars like the Audi R8 and Porsche 911.

We have a feeling we ain’t seen nothing yet from McLaren Automotive.