McLaren Trademarks Remuera, Muriwai Names Ahead Of First SUV
McLaren has spent six decades naming its road cars like lab experiments. P1, 650S, 720S, MP4-12C: alphanumeric codes that told you displacement, power output, or chassis generation, but nothing about the company behind them. That formula looks like it’s ending. McLaren filed trademark applications with the UK Intellectual Property Office on September 21, 2026, for two words that have nothing to do with spec sheets: Remuera and Muriwai.
Both names trace straight back to Bruce McLaren himself. Remuera is the Auckland suburb where he grew up and where his family ran a garage that became the spiritual birthplace of the entire company. Muriwai is the beach on New Zealand’s North Island where a 15-year-old Bruce entered a homemade Austin Ulster in a hillclimb and discovered he had a talent for driving fast. The filings landed one day before McLaren unveiled a new wordmark lifted directly from the lettering on that Remuera garage’s awning.
A Naming Convention Built For Cars That Don’t Exist Yet
McLaren hasn’t attached either name to a confirmed model. Motor1’s reporting makes clear the company has only formally confirmed the new wordmark itself, not a production nameplate for Remuera or Muriwai. But the timing is hard to ignore. The trademarks arrive as McLaren works through a $943 million expansion program that includes new supercars, in-house engine production, expanded carbon-fiber manufacturing, and a second UK assembly plant. Buried in that announcement is the detail every McLaren fan has been waiting to hear for years: the brand’s first SUV.
McLaren has resisted the SUV wave for over a decade while Porsche’s Cayenne, the Lamborghini Urus, Aston Martin’s DBX, and Bentley’s Bentayga turned four-door, two-row practicality into the thing that kept supercar makers solvent. That resistance appears to be ending. The reported SUV will have four doors and two conventional rows of seats, a first for a brand that has never built anything but mid-engined two-seaters.
Why Words Fit An SUV Better Than Letters And Numbers
An alphanumeric code like 750S works for a supercar because the buyer already knows the brand’s language. A four-door family hauler aimed at buyers cross-shopping a DBX doesn’t need to feel like a spec sheet. It needs an identity. Naming it after the town where Bruce McLaren grew up, or the beach where he first raced, gives McLaren a story to sell alongside the hardware, and it lines up neatly with the new logo’s own origin in that same Remuera garage signage.
McLaren has committed to building the SUV on a bespoke platform rather than borrowing architecture from another manufacturer, and the company says it will hold to its usual philosophy of lightweight, razor-sharp engineering. That’s a meaningful promise for a segment where rivals have leaned on shared platforms to hit the market faster.
What This Means For McLaren Purists
There’s no getting around what this is: McLaren finally admitting the SUV money works. Porsche, Lamborghini, Aston Martin, and Bentley all leaned on their four-door entries to fund everything else they build, and McLaren has watched that balance sheet lesson from the outside for years while rumors of its own SUV circulated for more than four years without confirmation. The Remuera and Muriwai filings suggest that era of denial is over, and that when the SUV does land, probably around 2028 alongside the next wave of McLaren product, it will carry a name tied to where Bruce McLaren came from rather than a code describing what’s under the hood.
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