McLaren Targets 4000 Annual Sales

McLaren has announced plans to drastically ramp up production from their current yearly output of 100 cars to 1,000 by 2011 and eventually 4,000 cars later on.

Production of the Mercedes-McLaren SLR is wrapping up as the car's last hurrah, the SLR Stirling Moss, was introduced at the North American International Auto Show last month. With only 75 units of the €750,000 retro roadster being produced, McLaren need to outline a product strategy that showed the company had a future.

In an interview with the Financial Times, McLaren chairman and chief executive Ron Dennis stated that the company is going to invest €250 million into volume production. The move should enable McLaren to sell future models at a much more affordable price which will allow the company to compete with rivals such as Ferrari and Lamborghini. He went to say that the company wants to build a standalone production facility in the UK but noted such a move might not make financial sense, instead hinting that future McLaren cars could be built by a third party such as Magna.

McLaren's first new model will be the P11 which has been frequently spotted undergoing testing in Scandinavia. Essentially a replacement for the SLR, the P11 features gullwing doors and a Mercedes engine which is rumored to produce between 550hp (404kW) and 600hp (441kW). The mid-engine supercar should arrive sometime in 2010 with a price somewhere in the neighborhood of €400,000.