Lease a McLaren 540C for just £32 a day – or for FREE using McLaren logic

McLaren has announced that a lease deal on the McLaren 540C will cost under £32 a day, the same as a return trip on the Gatwick Express from Victoria.

The McLaren 540C is McLaren’s affordable Sport Series model, with prices starting at just £128,550. And McLaren want to get you behind the wheel and out enjoying the McLaren experience in your very own 540C.

So they’ve taken great pride in declaring that you can have your very own 540C for the same £32 it costs for a return on the Gatwick Express train from London Victoria.

Which, really, is a bit of a no-brainer – a 50 mile round trip on a train or a McLaren 540C?

The trouble is, McLaren is being a bit disingenuous with their attention-grabbing headline.

In fact, you can have a 540C for 36 monthly payments of £946.48, which works out at under that £32 a day to get to Gatwick from central London. But McLaren conveniently don’t factor in the hefty deposit you need to make to achieve that.

McLaren want you to stump up a £35,000 deposit which, over 36 months, is equal to an extra monthly cost of £972.22 – more than doubling the headline cost.

In many ways the 540C is a bit of a supercar bargain thanks to three-year, 30k mile residuals of up to 63% and interest rates of 3.9% (but 7.9% APR thanks to that hefty deposit).

Using McLaren’s logic, you could actually have the 540C completely free. As long as you pay a £70k deposit.

But however you cut it, that means the 540C costs nearly £2k a month.