McLaren Keeps Saying the Right Things. The Question Is Whether Anyone's Listening.

The most interesting thing about McLaren's current moment isn't any single move. It's the accumulation.

New ownership out of Abu Dhabi. A merger with an EV startup. Luca di Montezemolo — the man who turned Ferrari into a religion — now sitting on the board. And then, threading through all of it, a quiet confirmation: no EVs yet.

Hagerty Media has mapped this sequence out, and it's worth sitting with. Because on paper, this looks like a company that finally has its house in order. In practice, it reads like a company that's assembled every ingredient for a meal it hasn't decided how to cook.

The Montezemolo Signal

Bringing in di Montezemolo is not a neutral decision. It's a statement of intent — or at least a statement of aspiration. The man presided over Ferrari during its most commercially and competitively dominant era. He understands what a supercar brand is supposed to feel like from the inside: exclusive without being cold, technical without being clinical, fast in a way that means something.

McLaren has always had the technical half of that equation. The cars are genuinely extraordinary machines. What the brand has never quite cracked is the emotional register. Ferrari sells desire. McLaren sells capability. Those are different products, even when the price tags are identical.

Di Montezemolo knows the difference better than almost anyone alive. Whether he has the authority — or the patience — to close that gap at McLaren is the real question his appointment raises.

No EVs Yet Is a Bet, Not a Gap

The EV pause is being read in some corners as indecision. I'd push back on that.

The supercar segment is one of the few places where the internal combustion engine still has genuine cultural permission to exist. The customers aren't buying these cars to commute. They're buying them because the sound, the sensation, and the mechanical directness are the product. Strip that out and you're selling a different thing entirely — and probably a worse version of what Rimac and Pininfarina already do.

Merging with Forseven gives McLaren the EV infrastructure when the moment is right. Holding off on actually building one suggests someone in Woking understands that arriving late with something excellent beats arriving early with something confused. That's a lesson the industry keeps having to relearn.

The risk is that "not yet" becomes "not ever" by accident — that the delay outlasts the window, and McLaren finds itself scrambling to catch up instead of choosing its moment. The line between patience and paralysis is thin, and it moves.

What the Chaos Actually Reveals

Here's what I keep coming back to: every one of these moves — the CYVN acquisition, the Forseven merger, the Montezemolo appointment — was made under different leadership, in a different strategic context, responding to a different version of the market. They may all be pointing in the same direction. They may not.

A writer at Hagerty Media has done the work of laying this timeline out clearly, and what it reveals, almost inadvertently, is how much McLaren is asking its audience to trust right now. Trust that CYVN is a patient owner. Trust that the Forseven technology will eventually become something road-going and real. Trust that di Montezemolo's presence means something beyond optics.

McLaren has earned some of that trust. The cars have always been the argument.

But trust has a shelf life. And the supercar market doesn't wait for anyone to figure out what they're building.