Lamborghini: EVs aren’t emotional or exciting enough… yet

With the 2024 Lamborghini Urus SE now revealed and inbound, executives of the Italian performance car brand have declared plug-in hybrid system the best fit for Lamborghini going forward on the basis of performance, emotion and excitement.

Speaking to select international media in the lead-up to the global debut of the plug-in hybrid super-SUV, Lamborghini chief technical officer Rouven Mohr said PHEV and battery-electric drivetrains have “advantages and disadvantages” from an engineering perspective.

But he stressed that PHEVs were absolutely the way forward for the Raging Bull brand, especially for the Urus.

“In our case I can tell you that the hybrid version is the better choice… because we have still the emotional part of the combustion works, but at the moment in the electric [car market], no-one find really a solution,” he said.

“I’m not saying it’s impossible to find a solution, but at the moment the customer feedback is that the people expect from Lamborghini – still – a combustion engine with a certain number of cylinders and also displacement, and we can achieve the same performance levels [as an EV].

“So at the moment, for us, it [PHEV] was definitely the right choice – for other brands it might be different and also in 10 years it might be also different.

“But at the moment, the request of our customers for pure electric cars in this, in our specific, very small segment is super limited, because the people aren’t looking for a car only to have mobility from A to B, because they have more than one car.

“They’re using the Lamborghini really to have this excitement and also to have the sound, a little but vibrations and also the behaviours of the car.

“For sure the electric cars have super performance… but you lose, a little bit, the character – and our customers, they want to have this kind of character in the car and at the moment an electric car is not offering this.”

That’s not to say Lamborghini is shunning battery-electric vehicles – it debuted a near-production EV concept at Monterey Car Week dubbed the Lanzador and has confirmed on numerous occasions the production version will be released in 2028.

What tricks the Raging Bull has up its sleeve to instil its iconic character and ‘emotion’ into the raised 2+2 coupe beyond its 1000kW-plus outputs remains to be seen.

Meantime, however, Mohr is eager to get to the bottom of why premium EVs have such abysmal residual values and said it’s a major hurdle for prospective customers.

“Another very important topic in our segment are the residual values… the customers are a little bit scared,” he said.

“What is with the residual values of these top-end, high electric cars?

“Even in the premium segment, the residual values are critical and for sure if you’ve spent so much money on a car, you don’t want to destroy the value from one to the other year.”

Mohr still has a fair bit of time up his sleeve to understand EV depreciation, given the segment-blurring Lanzador won’t sell in anywhere near the same volume as the Urus, and the fact the eventual replacement for the Urus – already confirmed to be electric – isn’t due until 2029.

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