The McLaren MP4-12C was the first supercar built by McLaren to officially arrive in South Africa. It was launched here by Daytona, now of Melrose, Johannesburg, back in early 2012. The first McLaren supercar in series-production for a number of years had a two-and-half year life-cycle in this country, before being replaced by the 540C and 570S models in mid-2014.
Clinical attention to detail
The MP4-12C is all about clinical attention to detail, which is typical of the McLaren ethos. In this, however, it is quite different to the McLaren supercar of the 1990s that preceded it, the F1, which may have looked fairly innocent but was a bit of a brute to handle.
McLaren paid a lot of attention to giving the MP4-12C an acceptable ride quality, while also ensuring that the suspension was controlled enough to generate very high grip in super-fast cornering.
Big performance numbers
As for performance, the production supercar used a McLaren-developed V8 power-plant with twin turbocharging. Known as the M838T engine, it developed 441 kW and 600 Nm of torque in a very flat curve between 3 000 and 7 000 rpm. This made the McLaren very driveable, as well as extremely fast. The 0-100 km/h time took 3,4 seconds and top speed was 330 km/h, pretty much benchmark stuff for 2012.
In 2013 McLaren introduced the 12C Spider, which is the open-topped version of the MP4-12C, and arguably a much more dramatic-looking car.
Which McLaren 12C holds its value best?
According to Jason Danker of Daytona, both the MP4-12C coupe and the 12C Spider hold their value extremely well. If pressed, he would probably lean towards the 12C Spider being the better investment, as he says the open-topped car has none of the drawbacks often associated with Spider versions of supercars.
“Because the 12C uses an extremely rigid carbon-fibre chassis, McLaren found it was not necessary to add weight to the Spider to ensure the car retained its rigidity. So the topless car is just as quick as the coupe version and just as rigid.”
We have a number of listings for the MP4-12C
Currently AutoTrader lists 6 examples of Used McLaren MP4-12C cars for sale, ranging in age from 2012 to 2014 models. Interestingly, all the cars are priced around the R2-million range. When the McLaren MP4-12C was introduced here in early 2012 it cost R3 180 000, and later the price rose to R3,4-million for the coupe and R3,7-million for the Spider.
The current asking prices for these cars, aged between 6 to 8-years-old, represents fairly good value retention in the supercar league. It seems customers for these cars are fully prepared to take a knock of over R1-million when it comes time to trading their cars. After all, in the supercar and hypercar stratosphere, being at the cutting edge of technology is what it’s all about!
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