McLaren
Creating digital luxury for a new kind of McLaren
McLaren was exploring a move into a new vehicle category - one designed to play a bigger role in everyday life. The question was not simply what the vehicle should do. It was what owning a McLaren should feel like when performance was only part of the story. We worked with the McLaren team to define that experience, make it tangible and carry its most important elements through to production.
Understanding a new kind of customer
McLaren knows exactly what makes one of its cars feel like a McLaren. But entering a broader luxury category introduced different customers, expectations and ownership moments.
There was no established digital ecosystem to build upon, so the team needed to decide what the experience should feel like, which automotive conventions to challenge and where digital could create moments people would genuinely remember.
We spent time with high-net-worth individuals, explored where their expectations were being shaped inside and outside automotive, and identified the opportunities that could make the experience unmistakably McLaren.
Giving the digital experience a soul
We translated the ambition into the moments that would define ownership: how the car welcomes you, how services adapt around you, how charging feels and how the experience continues beyond the vehicle.
We mapped the ownership journey, prototyped its most important interactions and created interactive concepts and films that allowed the wider experience to be understood as a whole.
That gave the McLaren team something concrete to shape, challenge and build around. Instead of starting with bottom-up feature specifications, teams could begin with the intended experience—and invest only in the technology needed to deliver it.
Carrying the vision into production
We stayed with McLaren as the work moved into design and development, helping design and engineering teams make decisions against a shared experience vision.
The principles established through the programme went on to inform a wider digital design system, giving McLaren a foundation that could extend beyond a single vehicle or launch.
“It’s rare to get consulting-level thinking with such premium design execution. The 12 weeks with Active Matter were a game-changer for us, removing months of discussion and busy work.”