McLaren Automotive has no desire to become a member or part of a product portfolio of a larger car manufacture as per Bentley, Rolls Royce and Ferrari. For McLaren complete independence is the way forward. The maker of limited production, high performance supercars believes it has the ability to better respond to technology changes than it would if were under the red tape control of a larger organisation. A McLaren Automotive executive, Jolyon Nash, recently said at the Shanghai Auto Show, “We’re very quick to move. Our product development life cycles are very efficient. In an industry like this, those are great advantages”. McLaren Automotive is part of the McLaren F1 group of companies and began production in 2011 starting with the MP4-12C. Recently the company launched its most affordable model to date, the £126k 540C. McLaren Automotive hope the 540C will become feeder model for customers to climb up the ownership experience to its more more expensive and faster models. At the moment McLaren Automotive make around 1,600 units per year and hope to increase sales to 4,000 units per year by 2017. The company is looking to expand into new markets and is targeting South America and South East Asia to join its current territories which includes Europe, China, Japan and North America. Whether McLaren Automotive will be independent in 10 years time is an altogether different matter one day they may well be swallowed up by a corporate car giant.