McLaren discontinues 12C, offers owners free upgrade

The only people this concerns is those who purchased a 2013 or 2014 MP4-12C as those people were under the mistaken belief that the car they just bought would continue to be produced for another 3 years, and as such, would maintain better resale value over the next 3 years by being the 'latest' model/version. Had they known the 650S was really a 2015 MP4-12C, would they have made their purchase?

People who bought an MP4 years ago have no concern as it doesn't really affect them - they knew at some point there'd be a newer model released and had plenty of time to sell their car after a year or two of use. But for those that just purchased one, even a used 2013, and PLANNED based on what Mclaren said, got a mini-screw job by the Factory.

 

And that's the problem. The people who got screwed are the ones who don't keep them. If you bought a 12C hoping to drive for free for the first year, you were sorely mistaken. The longer you keep it, the better value it becomes.

McLaren has said there would be a new car every year. Last year was P1 and we knew this year was going to be a 12C model. People expected the GT3, but got a 650S instead. Does that really make a difference? If you listen to what people on here are saying, 12Cs were not selling anyway and supply was too high, so why would it matter if it stayed in production or not? More supply of a car that's not selling would be any better?

No one was surprised that a new version of the 12C was coming this year. The car mule was seen like a year ago and everyone knows the pattern for exotics by now.

If you bought a 2013 car, just keep it and drive it for 40K miles. Why on Earth you would panic and sell at a $100K loss after a year an 2K miles is bizarre. In fact, I'd call you a complete idiot. The only exception is that you're too rich to care.

 

You come off as incredibly whiny and an amazing sense of entitlement. Why do you deserve anything at all other than a warranty and bug fixes? You have a car with engineering and build quality comparable to everyone else, and more exclusivity to boot given low sales.

Name me one other company in the world who gives you anything other than what you pay for.

Your ideas are nonsensical as well.

You complain about supply, that 12Cs are not selling at anything less than $60K off sticker if even that, yet you want them to keep it in production so that there is even more supply that no one wants.

Do you not see the massive contradiction here? That isn't going to do **** for anyone. You know what I'd rather have than a pat on the back? The choice of something new. Nothing is going to make 12C prices go back up. Nothing.

No more updates because it's discontinued. Boohoo. Who said they would update it at all again anyway? They didn't promise to constantly upgrade the car. They just said they would keep it up to date. If the 650S was the GT3, the 12C wouldn't get the updates anyway. How the hell would they sell a GT3 if the 12C got all the updates for free? For some reason you think the 12C was supposed to get free updates every year. Not sure where the hell you came up with that.

And even if they did say you could pay to upgrade your 12C to 650S spec, you're crazy to think anyone would. Do you know how much that would cost? Do you think someone is going to pay for a new suspension set up, new pistons, new heads, new fenders, new lights, and every other new component that would be require? And you think a $4K cup holder is expensive? Wait till you see the parts and labor cost of that conversion.

The 12C is no more obsolete than any other car. Do you think a 2010 458 is modern and cutting edge just because it's still for sale? Keeping a car on sale for 20 years doesn't make it any less obsolete.

 

So, I guess you think my ideas are no good then. That they wouldn't be accepted well by 12 c owners. They they wouldn't help transition the company from a car that isn't selling well into 2 cars that could. That they wouldn't help a person who is currently debating whether or not to buy a new McLaren would value a company that stands behind it's word ("ethos" I guess is what McLaren calls it).



I think you're in the minority.

You don't object to my ideas.

You object because you know I'm right and they're wrong.

 

I've been holding off replying as these threads are so polarized from Mac can do no wrong to "they are going out of business". The latter comment is amusing as the person who keeps posting this knows nothing of their financials, so the comment is pure hate. What gives?

For the record I had a 12c, I am waiting for a P1, own a couple of current Ferraris and some collectibles. My two cents:

- I am disappointed that the 12c depreciated like a "normal" car. Everyone had higher expectations.
- there were things I loved about the 12c over current Ferraris, but it also felt incomplete.
- the 650s seems to complete what the 12c started.
- the decision to go to the 650s is the right business decision.
- McLaren are the worst marketeers for such a well capitalized company. Too many examples.
- it's so bad it caused me to almost turn down the P1.
- I won't buy a 650s as the styling seems a little interim to me.
- the Mac chassis is far superior to Ferrari's. The 458 spider is like a wet noodle in comparison and even my F12 creaks a little when driving across an incline with less weight on one wheel.

I view Ferrari as refinement of a traditional platform, while McLaren is at the forefront of the next generation. One has a legacy to build from but the improvements are getting marginal. The other is new with more potential but needs to "run hard" to catch up.

Love my F12, eager to get my P1, still waiting for my ultimate spider.

 

Well said!

 

And I agree too!

Good luck on the P1. I think it's spectacular. If I could afford my super car dream it would be p1 first, Enzo 2nd, and LaFerrari third.

 

This thread is great .

 

Ferrari has proven that time and time again.

 

Great thread.

I for one enjoy reading Bob's comments.

Someone has to play the foil in this argument - afterall, this is a forum, not a board room. We are all arguing from our limited perspectives and experiences.

 

So essentially you think McLaren should keep producing a 12c, even though nobody will buy them since they all want the 650S, just so existing 12c owners can pat themselves on the back for owning the latest car? Oh, and somehow continuing to produce a car at a discount without demand will somehow not cause any further dilution of the market? And then you want them to provide incentives to trade-in the 12c, which will help out the 12c market how?

How does discontinuing the 12c make it "obsolete?" What makes you think McLaren is just going to abandon these cars and their owners? The F1 has been out of production for a couple decades now, and it still gets plenty of support.

And then McLaren is just supposed to hand out a bunch of free ****? Extended warranty and free service for seven years? Most businesses that intend to stay in business make their customers pay for that.

Things gets cancelled. New stuff comes out. Get over it.

 

Bottom Line ======> Fan boys will be fan boys.
I also like what The Mayor has written here. McLaren has alienated a fair number of owners who believed all their lies and drivel. Myself included.
But, they seem to think if they throw you a little bone it will soothe your anger towards them, lol. Funny thing is, I consider myself so lucky to have dumped this albatross (even at a large loss) before this 650S **** hit the fan; because right now the used price is falling even lower!! McLaren just keeps talking out of both sides of their mouth ! Lying and trying to cover their ass is what has turned people off. This phony crap about all their 650S orders is total b.s. .... How come you can get one in a few months, if they are booked solid?? McLaren should try to tell the truth .... it's easy to keep your story straight that way, boys !!
Word of mouth is hurting them now; people are not stupid. I've never seen so much animosity, by owners, towards any exotic car company.
A perfect example was their Iris system (nav) .... they put out a crap product and then had the gall to charge the customer money to replace their lousy piece of crap !! Slap in the face added to all their other slaps in the face !!
McLaren can be assured that they have now lost many of their original customers (loyal fans) and maybe they think they can make up ground with their upcoming small car (P13)??
Who the hell is going to buy their volume car when 'your dealership' is possibly 500 miles or more away? They think they can sell cars to Porsche 911 or Audi R8 customers with the puny McLaren dealer network?? They must be dead from the neck up !!
P.S. noone take some Dramamine, it will control wild spinning !!

 

You don't have to hold back, tell us what you really think. At least you have standing as a former owner, and if I recall,you had all kinds of problems with your car. Mine has been near flawless and I continue to enjoy it, but I won't pay the delta to get a 650S

 

Yes, sir. You are correct .... but, I'm just giving my 'personal' feedback, not some arbitrary bashing, solely to be mean; I just don't accept mediocrity.
I believe there are a few others who feel similar.
But, I'm glad you are rollin' trouble free. Enjoy !

 

It had the same problem as the current F1 cars - it just did not sound right, and it just did not look right.

 

Yes. I do. And I do for several specific business reasons, not because of emotion and certainly not because of hate.

1) Continuing the 12 c, even in low numbers, means that a one year old car (like all spiders) is not discontinued. Ask anyone in the car business what it means when the car you have is not in the current line up and the answer is "it's harder to sell".

2) It was a promise. Not only was it a promise 2 years ago it was a promise a month ago. Anyone who recently bought a 12c spider just found out their new car is not being replaced with another car. Is that a good thing or a bad thing to that owner do you think?

3) cutting the MSRP price of the 12c already happened -- in Australia. If the can do it once they can do it again. A little money is better than no money, which is what they are getting now. Lowering the cost of the 12c will allow it to separate itself from the 650s even more and give people a choice -- in the same way the 458 coupe and Speciale do. Not everyone wants to spend that much for a Speciale.

4) tempting and giving incentives to owners to hold on to their 12c's longer will help hold up resale value and avoid a massive sell off of people worried the other guy will dump his first.


Yes, cars get discontinued all the time. This is NOT one of those times. This was not a planned situation. McLaren believed they could sell this car for 5 years. McLaren was forced into this because their car is not selling at the rates they need and dealer MSRP asking prices are a joke.

If they weren't forced, they just lied to owners for at least a year.

Here is the problem for McLaren. They are basically betting the farm on the 650s until they either replace it or their new lower priced car comes out. That won't be for another 2 years at the earliest. And, they are going to need a lot of tooling and R & D money to complete either.

Yes, the P1 will make them money but they are capped at 375. If they build more, the people who are their best clients will scream.

So, McLaren needs to support it's auto division and R and D two new cars in 2 years while supporting themselves on P1 sales and the 650s. If the 650s doesn't sell like they think, the company is going to bleed cash for quite some time.

Continuing the 12c at a lower price would have lowered that risk and would keep factory workers working and parts suppliers supplying parts for at least one more year if not 2.

 

Unfortunately, that would be at the expense of their customers.

 

A little -- but they faced that same problem in Australia.

They offered discounts on trading the car in for a new one and had other incentives.

Right now dealers are accepting discounts of 60 grand or more of cars in stock. Reducing the MSRP only cuts back half that. The true market will set the price but a price reduction on the top will bring in more customers.

How much worse can it be for people losing $100K in one year in depreciation already?

 

You guys are just whiny and overly entitled. Your speak of brand loyalty is pathetic and your "loyalty" is only related to what they can do for your wallet. If they car doubled in value you'd be singing praise all day and you're full of **** if you say otherwise.

If all those original customers actually possessed some sense of brand loyalty they wouldn't have went running the second prices took a turn for the worse. I'm sure McLaren would love to have a bunch of people who dump their unused cars for massive discounts just because they've depreciated. A Veyron losses a $1M in depreciation, but I'm pretty sure they'll all line up for the next Bugatti too.

You made a bad choice. Get over it. It's $100K? What is that, 3 months work? Keep the car 5 years and it will cost you $150K. ZOMG, 4 months work and my sat nav that I, like most, probably got for free is buggy!

You got the car at the price you were comfortable paying. Quit whining like you've been wronged. You're butt hurt over the fact that you lost money and trying to blame it on someone else. Do you see me blaming the people dumping the stock I own that I believe in? You bought at the top and the market turned. That's life.

News flash: Don't buy an exotic car is $150K makes a difference in your life.

Unless you got a lemon, in which case that's just bad luck.

 

I'm being too hard on some of you guys.

I should actually be thanking you for selling me your unused car for 100k less.

I plan on enjoying it the next 4-5 years.

Sent from my Nexus 5 using Tapatalk

 

No one is "overly entitled". No one deserves to get rolled on a deal.

When you deal with high end luxury items, you expect to be treated with respect. You expect that company to live up to it's word. You expect that company to look out for it's very narrow base of loyal customers.

McLaren hasn't learned that lesson, at least not with 12c owners.

It's just business -- but you can do business right or you can do it like you think there's another idiot with cash just over the horizon, just like a hooker who stole a john's wallet while he slept.

We know which path McLaren chose.

 

Facts:

1. Everyone had the opportunity to check it out before buying it.

2. They knew the price and what they were getting.

3. They received their cars exactly how they wanted them, on time and at the exact price they were comfortable paying.

3 1/2. It was a first model year car and from essentially a new manufacturer. It is widely known first MY are, relatively speaking, the worst and that issues are very common.

4. There were some issues. This is not uncommon for any car.

5. The company McLaren hired for Iris went under before it was 100% and launch couldn't be delayed just to improve Iris.

6. Iris was given for free to many customers, though not all, to make up for earlier issues.

7. The car received very substantial performance upgrades for free to make the car better. This is unheard of in the industry. This was both for owner benefit and themselves for competitive reasons.

8. McLaren pledged to keep the 12C up to date throughout its life. What they did not pledge to do was continuously update it.

9 (Not fact, but close to.) It is very unreasonable to expect MY engineering changes to come for free to all previous cars. Some changes are to improve and resolves issue that may occur. You cannot expect McLaren to replace your transmission because they are using a new bolt that is more reliable. You cannot expect McLaren to give you a brand new suspension design for free either. It is not and never has been feasible. If you came to such a conclusion, I believe that was a mistake on your own part.

10. Today and again in June, all 12C owners will have a better car than they paid for without any additional cost. That is absolute and cannot be argued.

10.5. New 650S options are coming to the 12C as a retro-fit. They are much asked for options -- rear-camera and satellite radio. They are discounted, though not free and still way overpriced just like any option on an exotic car. However, no one paid for them in the first place so you can't complain about having to pay for them now. New options become available for all brands and cars as MY go on. They are never free.

11. The 12C remains one of top performing cars in the world at a competitive price. You cannot say with any certainty that a 12C is objectively worth less than a Ferrari or Lamborghini. You could however argue that it is worth more considering lower production volume and that they do not benefit as much from corporate parts and engineering sharing. It is quite possible that a 12C is actually more expensive to produce than the competition.

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13. Cars under warranty are still fixed. Cars out of warranty are still and will be supported.

14. The 650S is not 100% new. It is 25% new. It is entirely possible that improvements will still come to the 12C. In June you will receive at the very least 650S aero software updates. You may receive other 650S software tweaks that may or may not be made known and it is entirely possible that service bulletins and software updates will still come and improve aspects of the car ranging from reliability, performance, and bug fixes.

14.5. McLaren did initially say that the 12C would stay in production and have since said otherwise.

15. The affect of having a "discontinued" model is, however, subjective. There are many discontinued models in many brands that are more desirable than current ones or go on to become so. It is not McLaren's fault that such perception of a lesser car exist anymore than it is their fault people didn't find the 12C exciting enough. It is unfortunate, but entirely subjective and beyond their control. If I go on the 458 board the day the replacement comes out and say the 458 is now old and unwanted, I'm pretty sure I'd get laughed at.

15.5. The 12C being discontinued does not change the 12C in any way. This is absolute and cannot be argued.

16. McLaren does not treat their customers poorly. There is no proof of any mass wrong doing as far as I know. I have actually been treated extremely well. The head of Ferrari design never contacted me on Fchat and invited me to check out the LF because I really wanted to see it. It is fair to say that public perception is not great in some respects, but again, that does not impact the product you receive. A product which I will remind you that people had no problem paying for at whatever price they paid.

17. Depreciation was known after the first year to be very, very steep. Anyone buying after that and being disappointed with depreciation knowingly took that risk, even after being advised by many to just wait and see.

Opinion:

The facts speak volumes about the car and the brand. You cannot argue negatively, objectively speaking, about what you got. You can say McLaren's didn't take care of their customers' wallets, but I personally blame the 458 and Gallardo owners since they didn't appreciate it enough and drive up demand to an objectively better car.

It is what it is. Why try to come up with a bunch of excuses for being more concerned about the money than the car? It's alright to just say you value your money more than your car. If it is significantly more important to you than the car, you'd be better off owning the SP500 than the 12C or the 458 or anything.

Car price almost universally go down with each passing day. If you valued money more than the car, all you had to do was patiently wait a year. Drive you 458 for an additional year or whatever you had, then make a decision.

If you couldn't wait and absolutely had to have the car then, why sell it for so little with no use? Why drive it for 1 year and 2K miles for $100K when you could drive it 20K miles for 5 years for $150K? It's weird someone could be so impatient and want something so bad, then take such a loss without even using it.

Sucks that you lost money so quickly on the sale, but quit putting the blame of bad luck on someone else. You got what you paid for.

I believe the only real issue that was handled poorly was Iris updates for those that paid for it. Many, many people did not pay for it, but received it for free to make up for early teething issues. IMO, those who did in fact pay for it should have been either refunded or given credit towards something else. I do believe that it still was half-cooked before Iris 2.0, but to me this is no different than any car having some feature that just doesn't work well. Iris 1.0 being buggy is no different than there being bugs in iOS or Windows. It wasn't core to the car, and did work OK for the most part. It wasn't good though. It's an overpriced option that is vastly inferior to stand alone device. This is the case for every infotainment system in every car since their existence. Meh is par for the course. In this case McLaren was in fact over par.

Iris 2.0 is a major hardware change. It is fair to charge people for this, especially those that didn't pay for it in the first place. I personally haven't done the update and might not. Iris 1.0 is meh, but I can live with it since I find using a phone with the aux port to be vastly better than anything any car has ever offered. It is what it is and Iris 2.0 is definitely good as far as car infotainment goes in the current generation.

 

Nice McLaren foisted talking points list you got there, noone.
As they say, 'You are entitled to your own opinion. But you are not entitled to your own facts.' And, most of your facts are not based on much of what I encountered.
This might be your first exotic car, so possibly that is why you seem to think that everyone is focused on one thing: depreciation. To you, that seems the paramount issue!
For me, and (I think) others, it just may be all the countermanding stories we've been told.

Your gloss-over of these two 'talking points' was amusing:
#8. McLaren pledged to keep the 12C up to date throughout its life. What they did not pledge to do was continuously update it.
#14.5. McLaren did initially say that the 12C would stay in production and have since said otherwise.
Sounds quite similar to: "If you like your doctor, You can keep your doctor"
Earth awaits your return, Sir.