McLaren GT review

Now, while the McLaren part of the name says it's a car for drivers, the GT part of the name says it's going to spend time passing between average-speed limits and stuck on long motorway hauls, not to mention driving at night. For those jobs, people may reasonably want want adaptive cruise control, blind-spot monitoring and adaptive emergency braking. Maybe lane-departure warning and matrix LED headlights. This GT can't provide any of them.

Mind, it comes with a three-year warranty, and you can option that all the way out to 12 years. Service intervals are 10,000 miles. See, it can do ‘sensible’.

But it doesn't really do ‘cheap’, though the £163,000 starting price sounds good given the performance. And helpfully a 2021 model year update has collected together a number of the desirable extras into no-cost options packs. A lot of what we've mentioned in the test (powered seats, B&W stereo, reversing camera, luggage retention, machined aluminium cabin trim) falls into these £0 options. Beyond that comes the tempting expense of MSO customisation, of course...

Fuel consumption is a claimed 23.7mpg (while CO2 emissions are 270g/km). You might well manage that on a long trip, though use it hard on a mountain pass and of course the thirst will double. The 72-litre tank is only just enough for proper GT-ing. But then swish as all its materials are, you might be needing a stretch of your legs sooner than the fuel light pings anyway.

With the GT now a couple of years old, second-hand examples are swelling in number. The entry point as we write (the end of 2021) is around £130,000, and only one of the dozen cars in the classifieds has crossed the 10,000-mile threshold. Which is either a sign people are using these as their urban everyday transport rather than a fully fledged GT car, or that the two years of global doom since the GT’s launch has stymied any lengthy foreign adventures in the car.