Lewis Shaw
The Lamborghini SUV has been given the go ahead and will go is set to go on sale in 2018 as a luxury SUV rival to the Porsche Cayenne and upcoming Bentley SUV.
Luxury SUVs are all the rage these days and just about every high performance luxury brand either sells one or will sell one in the very near future. Porsche, Maserati, Jaguar, Bentley, Rolls Royce and even Aston Martin are cashing in on the world’s obsession with tall all-wheel drive luxury-mobiles. These are all brands with rich heritage engrained in sports cars and racing (except for Rolls Royce), yet they’re all going to build big, heavy high-riding buses. And you can now add Lamborghini to that list because the Italian brand has just announced that it too is working on an SUV.
That’s right, Lamborghini the king of all low-slung mid-engine completely impractical supercars is going to build a big four-door wagon on stilts. The Lamborghini SUV represents a massive shift for Lamborghini which is going to hire 500 new employees and double the size of its production facility just to build the thing. It reckons it’ll build around 3000 Lamborghini SUVs every year, making it easily the brand’s most popular model. Right now Lamborghini builds around 1400 Huracans and 1200 a year.
The Lamborghini SUV should also be a massive money generator for the brand, allowing it to invest more in the development of its ultra high performance supercars. Because the Lamborghini SUV will share its underpinnings with the new Audi Q7, next-fen Porsche Cayenne and Bentley SUV, the cost to develop the Lambo shouldn’t be that high because most of the hard work has already been done by the VW Group.
The Lamborghini SUV will be derived from the Urus concept which the brand revealed a few years ago. While that car used an ultra-lightweight carbon fiber chassis, the production version will be more conventional to keep costs low. The SUV will likely be the brand’s cheapest model when it goes on sale.
But don’t go thinking Lamborghini is going soft because back when it revealed the Urus it claimed its SUV would be the fastest and most extreme high performance SUV the world has ever seen. So it should be brisk then. As for engines, it’ll most likely borrow from the Audi parts bin adopting a twin-turbo V8 with over 600hp. A V10 or V12 just wouldn’t make sense in a car of this type because of the torque requirements. Though it’s possible the Lamborghini SUV could also be a hybrid as there’s space in the Audi-developed chassis for a battery pack under the boot floor.
We’ll learn more in the coming months and years no doubt, but these are definitely very interesting times for Lamborghini.
