Angus MacKenzie
The Big Picture
Can Lambo survive electrification?
“T
his is going to be the biggest challenge since the beginning of the company.” Lamborghini boss Stephan Winkelmann knows a thing or two about challenges. He was at Lambo in 2009 when the global financial crisis hit and sales of expensive supercars tanked. A few years later he had to convince the aficionados a Lamborghini SUV built using Porsche and Audi parts would be a good thing, and it wouldn’t corrupt a brand famous for building some of the fastest, most extreme cars ever made. So what now could be more of an existential threat to Lamborghini than either of those ructions? Winkelmann doesn’t hesitate. “Electrification,” he says, “and the acceptance of electrification. I strongly believe that what we have done in the past was evolutionary. Now it’s really a cut and a new beginning.” Ironically, Lamborghini is in great shape, perhaps in the best shape it’s ever been. Sales are rapidly rebounding to record levels after the COVID-induced slump of the past two years. Thanks to years of investment by Volkswagen Group, the factory at Sant’Agata Bolognese is a state-of-the-art facility making cars that are better engineered, more reliable, and built to higher quality levels than any other Lamborghinis in the marque’s history. There’s money to spend on new products. Lamborghini, which went bankrupt in the late ’70s and struggled through the ’80s and ’90s, is positioned better than ever to determine its own destiny. The problem is, determining Lamborghini’s destiny isn’t as straightforward as it used to be. Can a Lamborghini really be a Lamborghini without the spine-tingling, gut-punching mood music of a screaming V-12, a roaring V-10, or a thundering twin-turbo V-8? Is a Lamborghini powered by batteries and electric motors even a thing? That’s perhaps why Lamborghini is not rushing to embrace the idea of an electric supercar. The feedback Winkelmann is getting from customers says they’re simply not interested. The Aventador and Huracán are being replaced—in 2023 and 2024, respectively—with new cars that will have hybrid powertrains—more evolutionary than revolutionary. The Urus SUV, Lamborghini’s 82 MOTORTREND.COM OCTOBER 2022
cash cow, will get a heavy face-lift in 2024, along with a hybrid powertrain. The big step-change comes in 2028, when Lamborghini will launch its first-ever fully electric vehicle. It will be an addition to the range, sitting alongside the Aventador and Huracán replacements and the revised Urus. And it won’t be a supercar. “It will be a 2+2 GT car, like the 350 GT Ferruccio Lamborghini started with in 1963,” Winkelmann says. “Less performance-only, more daily drivable.” Winkelmann says many existing Lamborghini customers will readily accept the idea of an electric Lamborghini GT. “Most of them already have an electric car,” he says. He believes a fast, comfortable, dramatically styled, electric-powered daily driver is the logical starting point for Lamborghini’s transition to full electrification in the mid-2030s, when the Aventador and Huracán replacements are themselves replaced by electric models. Electric Lamborghinis will still be very fast in a straight line, but as even quotidian EVs can easily deliver ferocious acceleration, Winkelmann says engineers will focus on chasing the ultimate lateral acceleration numbers. They’ll aim to make electric Lamborghinis go through corners faster than any other electric car. Lamborghini has experience making big, heavy machines feel remarkably talented in the twisty bits. “This is one of the things which has worked out very well with the Urus,” he says. “Nobody believed the Urus would have been so easy and so Lambo-like in the corners.” Winkelmann says he’s confident Lamborghini can make electric vehicles that look like Lamborghinis and perform like Lamborghinis. But they won’t, he acknowledges, sound like Lamborghinis. At least not like the Lamborghinis we’ve all come to know and love. Will it matter? He isn’t sure. “That is going to be digested by the new generations coming up,” he says, noting the Lambo buyers of tomorrow are today barely in their 20s. Unlike traditional Lamborghini customers, they’re going to grow up with high-performance electric vehicles. For them, a Lamborghini supercar without a bombastic internal combustion engine probably won’t seem at all shocking. Q
The Terzo Millennio concept, unveiled in late 2017, provided design inspiration for the Huracán Tecnica, but Lamborghini has only begun exploring its electric potential.
