A long time ago, in (I believe) an issue of Car Magazine from the mid-1990s, the designer Gordon Murray shared his thoughts about a possible four-door follow-up to the McLaren F1.
Road cars weren’t really his thing. Until then, his career had been focused on Formula 1 car design, and he brought that sport’s obsession with weight savings with him. Were he to design a sedan, he’d trim the interior with textile, not leather. After all, wool made fine suits and coats, Murray reasoned, and it would save weight.
A four-door McLaren never happened during his tenure, nor has one appeared since. Murray now runs his own boutique hypercar company, which also builds no sedans. But the idea that high-end cars could use something other than leather has stuck with me, especially after driving BMW’s i7, which debuted in 2022 with a premium cashmere wool interior. More recently, new EVs have experimented with interesting textile alternatives to leather. Two good examples are the BMW iX3 and the Audi A6, though neither can be ordered with these textile options in the US.
