McLaren Wants More U.S. Stores. Franchise Law Is About to Get a Vote.
Speaking at Monterey Car Week, McLaren CEO Nick Collins floated growing the brand’s American retail network by as much as 40 percent — somewhere between five and 10 additional stores over roughly two years — on the strength of the U.S. now accounting for more than half of global sales. Corporate-run experience centers in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles are part of the same push.
For a company that sells in the low thousands worldwide, that’s not a rounding error. It’s a structural change to how the brand reaches buyers, and it runs straight into a body of state law almost nobody covering supercars ever mentions.
Thirty-odd stores is genuinely thin
McLaren’s own retailer announcements put the global network at over 100 retailers across more than 40 markets. The U.S. slice of that is a fraction of what Porsche or even Ferrari fields, which is why adding five to 10 points moves the needle so much in percentage terms and so little in absolute ones.
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The same release, from February 2024, is a useful reality check on where American demand actually sits: McLaren said California alone accounted for 26 percent of U.S. volume since 2018, and that McLaren Westlake Village made seven retail locations in that state. One state, better than a quarter of the business. If the U.S. is now more than half of global sales, California by itself is plausibly north of 13 percent of everything McLaren builds.
Here’s the part that will slow this down
You cannot simply drop a new franchised store wherever demographics look promising. Every state has a dealer-protection statute, and adding a point inside an existing franchisee’s territory triggers a formal process.
Take Florida, one of the obvious targets for a supercar brand. Under Florida Statute 320.642, a manufacturer proposing an additional dealership must notify the state, which publishes the notice and gives existing same-line-make dealers 30 days to protest. In a county with more than 300,000 people — which is most of the Florida a McLaren dealer would want — an existing store has standing to protest if it’s within 12.5 miles of the proposed location. In smaller counties the radius stretches to 20 miles.
And the burden runs the wrong way for the manufacturer. The statute says the application must be denied when a protest is timely filed and the licensee fails to show the existing dealers are not providing adequate representation. McLaren would have to prove its own franchisee isn’t doing the job. If it loses, the denial stands for 12 months.
That’s a real constraint on a brand whose existing dealers just posted their best years. A retailer that has been carrying the flag through McLaren’s lean stretch is unlikely to greet a new store 13 miles away with enthusiasm, and the law hands them a genuine lever.
Which is exactly why the experience centers make sense
The corporate-run showcases planned for New York, Miami, and Los Angeles aren’t a branding indulgence. They’re a workaround.
Florida’s statute extends notice-and-protest to service-only facilities. What it does not cover is a space that neither sells nor services vehicles. A brand lounge that displays cars, hosts commissioning sessions, and sells merchandise sits outside the machinery entirely, and it puts a McLaren storefront in a dense urban market where a full franchise point would be commercially and legally awkward.
McLaren has already run this play. The company’s first Brand Experience Center opened at Wynn Las Vegas in fall 2023, and by McLaren’s own account it was averaging roughly 800 visitors a day and repeatedly breaking the brand’s merchandise sales records. That is a lot of top-of-funnel exposure for a company that builds a few thousand cars a year, with none of the floorplan cost or franchise friction of a real store.
The argument for density has nothing to do with showrooms
If you own one of these things, network coverage is a service question, not a shopping question. Consider NHTSA recall 24V-901, filed in January 2025.
It covers 163 U.S. examples of the 2021 765LT Coupe — specifically the ones built without a factory roof scoop. The rear cabin window is a polycarbonate panel bonded to a carbon frame with adhesive, and McLaren determined it could de-bond and, in some cases, detach entirely. The company logged 38 worldwide claims between August 2021 and October 2024.
The investigation is the interesting bit. McLaren ran an extensive test program and could not reproduce a detachment. The break came from anecdotal reports that some circuits require cars to run with the windows down as a safety measure — meaning aero loading with the glass open, at speed, on track, was the missing variable. Partial de-bonding usually announced itself as a rattle from behind the occupants.
The fix: bespoke fasteners mechanically retaining each corner of the panel, on top of the original adhesive. Until that was available, McLaren told owners not to exceed 96 mph with the windows open and to stay off racetracks — and offered, on request, to lay additional adhesive around the frame perimeter as a stopgap for anyone who couldn’t wait.
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Sit with that. A 765LT owner was asked to not track a car built expressly for tracking, and the remedy required a physical visit to a franchised store. On a population of 163 cars scattered across a country this size, the nearest McLaren service point being three states away is not an abstraction. That’s the case for more retail points, and it’s a stronger one than any argument about foot traffic.
The same logic applies to collision work. These are carbon monocoque cars, and the network of shops certified to touch structural carbon is thinner still than the sales network. Practical advice for anyone shopping one: before you sign, find out where the nearest authorized service and approved bodyshop actually are, and what a flatbed to either costs.
Product is the wild card
The stores being added now will open into a lineup in transition. McLaren has already confirmed the 788HS as the definitive and final evolution of the supercar line that ran from the 720S through the 765LT and 750S — 777 bhp from the twin-turbo V8, and just 200 cars worldwide split evenly between coupe and spider.
Two hundred units globally does not fill five to 10 new American showrooms. Whatever replaces that lineage does. Collins has been signaling new categories, and under CYVN ownership the company has the balance sheet to attempt them.
Building the retail capacity first is the correct order of operations. It’s also the slow part, because in most of the states McLaren wants to grow, the existing dealers get to file a brief.