The Italian supercar maker’s 1,340-horsepower electric car won't go on sale for five years
LAMBORGHINI’S FRESHLY REVEALED Lanzador is its first all-electric car, destined to form a fourth model line alongside the Urus SUV, Huracan, and hybrid Revuelto supercars when it goes into production in 2028.
Normally, so far out from production, such a show car would be a strictly static object, carved by hand from clay, and with blacked-out windows concealing the fact there’s no interior. This is no such show car.
“We are very close to the production car,” Lamborghini’s chief technical officer Rouven Mohr tells me from the passenger seat as we exit a coastal lay-by on Pebble Beach’s 17 Mile Drive. “It’s a show car in terms of the details, some of the design things we are still working on. But from a packaging point of view we are closer to the production car than the Urus concept was.”
Lamborghini showed off its first SUV concept in 2012, five years before the Urus went into production. Incidentally, a successor to today’s Urus will become Lambo’s second all-electric car when it arrives in 2029. Electric supercars will apparently come later.
The Lanzador’s packaging is that of what Lamborghini calls a 2+2 “Ultra GT.” Harking back to some of its front-engined cruisers of the 1960s and ’70s, the EV offers seating for two up front, followed by a pair of much smaller seats behind and luggage space at the rear.
Despite the low seat and raked screen, the cabin is laudably airy, with a low dashboard providing great visibility ahead and masses of open space between the front seats. Bridging the central armrest with the dashboard is a floating control panel housing the start/stop button (shielded by a red, flip-up cover, just like current Lambos) and a new rotary controller called the “pilot unit.”
Thumbing its nose at the touchscreens and frustratingly unresponsive capacitive touchpads so many modern cars are guilty of possessing, this pilot unit is a big, bulky, and unashamedly tactile way of controlling the Lanzador’s climate and infotainment systems.
A set of driving mode selectors on the steering wheel are equally pleasing to touch, with those on the right designed to “add some spice” to the car’s driving dynamics, says Mohr. Fondling the pilot unit as he talks, the chief technical officer adds: “We strongly believe that some specifically positioned haptic [switchgear] gives additional value.”
For now, the Lanzador concept has a pair of digital displays set into the dashboard which flip upward when the car is switched on—a nod to the pop-up headlights of the Lamborghini Countach, apparently. Lambo’s seminal supercar also inspired the glass roof of the concept, where horizontal rails echo the groove into which the Countach’s periscope-style rear mirror is housed.
Naturally, this being a concept car, door mirrors are replaced by cameras feeding live video to displays installed beneath the A-pillars. Their position isn’t particularly intuitive, and the pillars will surely become wider on the production car to meet crash safety requirements.
The size, shape, and position of the driver display feels about right, but the identically-sized and symmetrically-installed passenger display seems too small and too far away to be practical. It's safe to suspect the concept cabin’s symmetry will be sacrificed for improved ergonomics before the Lanzador goes into production.
That said, Lamborghini has clearly put effort into making the interior feel believable. This isn’t a flight of fancy with a steering wheel that disappears into the dashboard, ready for a fully-autonomous future that may never arrive. It is, instead, evidence of Lamborghini taking a considered approach to concept design—an honest demonstration of what its first EV will look like.
But how will it sound? Lamborghini isn’t yet ready to tackle the thorny subject of electric supercar sound, or precisely how its EVs will deliver the sort of emotion its V10 and V12 engines serve up without even trying. How the electric Lanzador achieves this isn’t yet clear, but Lamborghini confirms it is working on it, using driving simulators. Mohr says: “This is for sure a big challenge for us, I have to admit. We don’t want to do something completely decoupled from the driving experience, because then it’s very artificial. And for sure we are investigating using some frequencies [produced by the car’s electric motors], but not imitating a pure combustion sound.”
Just as the Mustang Mach-E was an all-new product line for Ford, and the Taycan slotted neatly between the 911 and Panamera at Porsche, the Lanzador is another string to Lambo’s bow. It’s a tantalizing glimpse of the near future, but to discover exactly what the electric successor to the Miura, Countach, and Diablo bloodline really is, we’ll have to wait just a few more years.
Interview by Wired
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