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PARIS MOTOR SHOW: Lamborghini's foreign affair
Shock! Horror! Future of Italian supercar maker's profitability might be Slovakian!Lamborghini could be forced to shift production away from its signature Sant’Agata Bolognese factory if it receives a green light for its much-needed Urus project.
The SUV, showed for the first time as a concept car at this year’s Beijing Motor Show, has forced Lamborghini’s board to consider moving production outside Italy and consider neighbouring countries like Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
“One of the options for an SUV is building it outside Sant’Agata and even outside Italy,” Lamborghini President Stephan Winkelmann admitted yesterday. “But it’s more important that we have a car than where we make it.
“We are looking into every possible solution and it’s clear that it has to be something different to what we do now.”
With proposed volumes of 3500 cars a year, the Urus would instantly more than double the output of the current Sant’Agata Bolognese facility, whose most productive year was 2008 when it built 2400 Gallardos and Murcielagos.
“You’ve seen our footprint in Sant’Agata. Building it here would require a very significant change to our production to do another 3500 cars at Sant’Agata,” Mr Winkelmann said. “But whatever we do, we feel there needs to be some sort of final assembly in Sant’Agata.”
That system would be an extension of the current Gallardo’s production, with aluminium chassis, engine, body panels, gearbox, differentials, electronics architecture, brakes and suspension components all brought in from outside suppliers and assembled at Sant’Agata.
Yet the Urus will be something different. Mr Winkelmann admitted the SUV would arrive no sooner than 2017 and would need to be priced at Lamborghini-style levels.
“The Urus – if we call it the Urus – will be priced above all other vehicles in the luxury SUV class. It will be at least 150,00 euros.”
The SUV is planned to be the fastest-accelerating and best-handling soft roader in the luxury car world – a tall order when Porsche’s Cayenne Turbo S and Mercedes-Benz’s AMG GL65 twin-turbo V12 already exist.
At just under five metres long, Lamborghini plans that the Urus should hit 100km/h in something around the four-second region. Lamborghini’s R&D boss, Maurizio Reggiani, suggested the Urus would need “At least 600 horsepower” to achieve its goals. That’s around 450kW, which is precisely what AMG’s biturbo 6.0-litre V12 already produces in the GL65.
Yet Mr Winkelmann also hinted that the Urus might be offered with two different engines, one of which is widely though to be a development of Porsche’s twin-turbo V8, and could produce Lamborghini’s first hybrid.
“It is clear that Lamborghini has one engine for one model and due to the size of our cars and their weight, a hybrid does not fit in our normal cars and it would destroy their power-to-weight and they would be sitting ducks,” Mr Winkelmann explained. “In an SUV, it might be a global approach to have hybrid or plug-in hybrid technology if the car has one or two different engines. There is also more space in an SUV than one of our super sports cars.”
Lamborghini’s Director of Research and Development, Maurizio Reggiani, agreed, insisting that 50km of pure electric power would mean an additional 200kg of battery capacity alone.
“Then we have to find somewhere to put the battery, which is very difficult in cars that are packaged tightly like our cars,” he said. “Realistically, you would have to do the battery and then build the car around it and with what we would have to do and the knowledge we have today it’s impossible in a super sports car, less impossible in an SUV.
“We could be looking at a VW Group powertrain and we are part of the group, so that is sensible,” Reggiani explained. He admitted that the Lamborghini management team hadn’t ruled anything yet, especially not the Cayenne Turbo’s V8.
“It could use a pure petrol power, it could involve some performance-boosting hybrid system. At the moment the important thing is to see what happens in the Group’s development because we have four or five years before we will have something to sell.”
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Written byMichael Taylor
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