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.

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