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Neil Underwood spent six years dressing McLaren's road cars in bespoke paint and hand-stitched leather. Now he's selling Le Mans prototypes to ultra-high-net-worth customers – and the business model might be more significant than the car itself.

When Neil Underwood explains what he does for a living, the job title alone is worth the price of the conversation. He is McLaren Automotive's Head of HyperTrack Cars – a division that didn't exist until recently and one that sits at the precise intersection of racing and retail.

His brief is deceptively simple: take the car McLaren Racing is building to win the FIA World Endurance Championship and create customer derivatives that ultra-high-net-worth individuals can buy, drive on the world's best circuits, and – crucially – own outright.

Neil Underwood spent six years dressing McLaren's road cars in bespoke paint and hand-stitched leather. Now he's selling Le Mans prototypes to ultra-high-net-worth customers – and the business model might be more significant than the car itself.

When Neil Underwood explains what he does for a living, the job title alone is worth the price of the conversation. He is McLaren Automotive's Head of HyperTrack Cars – a division that didn't exist until recently and one that sits at the precise intersection of racing and retail.

His brief is deceptively simple: take the car McLaren Racing is building to win the FIA World Endurance Championship and create customer derivatives that ultra-high-net-worth individuals can buy, drive on the world's best circuits, and – crucially – own outright.

Justin Douglass, Head of Genesis Australia

Genesis plans to double its retail footprint by 2029 – with Canberra, Adelaide and Hobart in the sights. But the real story is how that network will be built, and what the influx of new luxury entrants means for a brand still chasing scale.

When Genesis launched in Australia in 2019, the non-European luxury space was a two-horse race. Lexus – three decades of Toyota-backed network investment, reliability reputation and a loyal ownership base – and Genesis, brand new, with a handful of factory-owned showrooms and a product range built on Hyundai underpinnings.

Seven years on, the landscape has shifted fundamentally. Denza is building 20–25 standalone dealerships backed by BYD’s deep pockets. Cadillac has a Sydney Experience Centre and plans for Brisbane, Melbourne and Auckland. Zeekr is in the market, and there are more Chinese top-shelf wannabes around the corner. The non-European luxury segment, which was barely a category a few years ago, is now attracting serious capital from multiple global automotive groups simultaneously.

Justin Douglass, who has led Genesis Motors Australia since January 2024, doesn’t see that as a threat. In a wide-ranging interview with TheAutoExec, the former Volvo and VW Group executive

The economic logic was arguably always there. One auto executive is working on how to apply a new look ‘agency model’ without starting a war.

In offices in Stuttgart or Tokyo, finance executives spend their days fighting for every cent. The same can be said of Detroit, Guangzhou or Ulsan…

Every component in a vehicle is analysed, costed, and squeezed. The procurement teams work relentlessly to shave fractions off supplier contracts. The logistics are optimised. The national sales companies run lean.

Every step from design to factory gate is controlled to within – as one automotive executive put it to me recently – "a millimetre of its life". In a changing global auto environment every dollar and cent counts as brands invest billions in tech development and also deal with the emergence of new competitors with a lower cost base.

And then, after they’ve squeezed every last cent out of the cost base?

"Then you give dealers a fat margin and they can piss it up against the wall."

That's Richard Emery, the President and CEO of Hino Australia, offering a perspective

Tasman Ute hasn't conquered the sales heights Kia had hoped.

With the Tasman ute underperforming and traditional volume drivers softening, Kia Australia's 2026 growth hinges on an ambitious 60-plus per cent increase in electric vehicle sales.

When Kia Australia CEO Damien Meredith stood before the media at the Tasman ute launch in July 2025, he was unequivocal. The brand would sell 20,000 Tasmans in its first year. It had to. The number was non-negotiable.

Seven months later, with fewer than 4,200 Tasmans delivered and January 2026 registrations at just 467 units, the language has changed.

"We believe now that Tasman is a slow burn rather than a big jump straight away," Meredith told TheAutoExec in a warts and all conversation last week.

It is a significant rollback for a product intended to

Kia Australia boss Damien Meredith on navigating emissions regulation, building a brand moat against Chinese competition, and why he wants the EV subsidy scrapped

Kia Australia CEO Damien Meredith doesn't mince words when describing the competitive reality facing legacy automotive brands in 2026.

"It's back to World War I," he told TheAutoExec. "We're in the trenches, and we're going to go ground."

It's a vivid metaphor from a CEO who has spent a decade transforming Kia from a value-driven proposition into Australia's fourth-largest automotive brand.

In Meredith’s defence, the new car battle-space has changed dramatically

She bought the first prototypes with her own money on Amazon. Eight years later, BMW engineer Stella Clarke’s invention is heading for serial production. The real story isn’t the technology – it’s how it survived the system.

There’s a perception in Australia’s automotive trade that Chinese brands hold a mortgage on innovation. That legacy OEMs are too slow, too bureaucratic, too wedded to the way things have always been done. Even the term legacy smacks of that.

Stella Clarke is the counter-argument.

Clarke is a research engineer in BMW Group’s Open Innovations division in Munich. She’s Australian – raised in Sydney’s Maroubra – and the person behind

The Federal Chamber of Automotive Industries has responded to the Government’s unfair contract terms consultation with a blunt message: the current regime works, dealers are sophisticated businesses, and more regulation risks hurting consumers. Not everyone agrees.

When the Albanese Government announced a consultation on extending the ban on unfair contract terms to franchised new car dealers, the AADA’s response was swift and welcoming.

As we reported earlier this week, AADA CEO James Voortman outlined a two-stage reform agenda – unfair contract terms now, unfair trading practices next – and flagged customer data ownership as a live issue in agency model transitions.

The manufacturers’ view, predictably, is rather different.

The Albanese Government has opened consultation on extending the ban on unfair contract terms to franchised new car dealers. AADA CEO James Voortman tells TheAutoExec what it means – and what the association say is still missing.

The Australian Automotive Dealer Association (AADA) has welcomed the Albanese Government’s announcement of a consultation to extend the ban on unfair contract terms to all franchisees – including the nearly 4,000 new car dealers the AADA represents.

It’s a step the AADA has been pushing for across multiple Senate inquiries and Federal Court cases. But the real story isn’t the consultation itself. It’s

On influence versus volume, why the ten brands that matter most look nothing like the VFACTS top ten, and which ones I argued with myself about for far too long.

COMMENT: An interesting weekend discussion. My friends at DMARGE.com asked me which ten car brands are the most influential in Australia right now. They wanted to start a conversation with their men’s lifestyle readership. Not car nuts, but car curious. People who notice what’s in their neighbour’s driveway. People who have opinions about utes and Teslas. People who’ve started seeing brands at the school drop-off they’ve never heard of.

Simple enough question. I assumed I’d knock it out in 20 minutes. Three hours later, I was still arguing

KPMG surveyed 110 automotive CEOs. What they revealed about their own confidence – or lack of it – should concern every executive in this industry.

There is a number buried in KPMG's latest Industrial Manufacturing and Automotive CEO Outlook (download here) that deserves more attention than it will probably receive.

Eighty-seven percent of automotive CEOs – more than any other industry sector surveyed – say they are confident in their industry's global growth prospects. That is the headline the report leads with, and it is the kind of finding that gets reprinted in trade media without much interrogation.

The number that follows it is the one that I think matters more.