Lamborghini details its electrification rollout

Lamborghini is about to begin a new age of electrification as it prepares to release its first hybrid car, the successor to the Aventador, in 2023.

The Italian sports car maker’s Asia-Pacific chief Francesco Scardaoni confirmed to Australian media that the follow-up to Lamborghini’s long-lived flagship, launched in 2011, will be offered with both a naturally-aspirated V12 and a plug-in hybrid powertrain.

What it won’t be is a modified version of the current car.

“The car is completely redesigned,” said Scardaoni. “The monocoque is a new one, the chassis is totally new, totally new shape, totally new engine, there’s nothing common with the Aventador, started from blank.”

While stopping short of confirming concrete details of the new car’s powertrain, Scardaoni told carsales the car will have the ability to operate on electricity alone but also that “the overall architecture and the way we use the electric power is innovative.”

In response to speculation that future Lamborghini models would use supercapacitor technology, as seen in the limited-edition Sian FKP37, Scardaoni said: “We wanted to develop supercapacitor on our limited-edition cars to understand what will be the reaction from customers to starting to have hybrid systems.

“We saw that the trend and the response was really positive. New customers are also really keen on having new technologies. We are having younger customers in our family, customers that are growing [up] with a different mindset compared to my generation so they are more keen on having eco-friendly cars, sustainable products.”

In 2024 the next stage of Lamborghini’s hybrid journey will be carried out with the successor to the Huracan and a new variant of the Urus crossover, both again using a plug-in hybrid powertrain.

Less is known about this powertrain, but it appears extremely unlikely the Huracan’s V10 will continue. We’d speculate that it will be a hybridised version of the twin-turbo V8 in the current Urus, which is about to receive a high-output Performante range-topper and, later this year, a facelift.

Lamborghini’s first pure-electric model is scheduled to appear in the second part of the decade, but Scardaoni confirmed it will not be an all-new model but instead a 2+2, perhaps foreshadowing the return of an Espada-type model, though that is pure speculation.

Asked if the European Union’s recent decision to support e-fuels gave Lamborghini hope that the combustion engine could continue, Scardaoni replied: “It’s a matter of having more opportunities on the table.

“There are customers that will be not really keen on getting into this new trend of electrification, so this will give us more opportunities, more paths to invest in terms of development, and this can also be a parallel way to comply with stricter emissions all over the world.

“The plug-in hybrid gives us some freedom to play a bit more, but we have to consider with an eight-year life cycle you have to plan for eight years, which is really important to consider. We know with the new Aventador we can do it [but] with the new Huracan we have to plan for a car that will start in 2024 onward.

“We also hope that regulation in terms of emission will be a bit more standardised all over the world because right now the differentiation is pretty hard and gives us more problems to fix. It’s not easy to just have one car that can satisfy the entire world. As a manufacturer of course we would like to just have one rule in terms of emissions standards.”  

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