► Spyshots of Lamborghini Urus
► Lambo’s first mainstream SUV, and first turbo
► On sale 2018, expected to cost £145k
Where else would a Lamborghini be tested but at the Nurburgring? Even if it’s the all-new, upcoming Lamborghini Urus SUV, Italy’s madcap supercar builder can’t resist.
Clad in the usual swirly camo, this performance SUV could double sales for Lambo when it goes on sale in 2018.
It looks remarkably close to the original Lamborghini SUV concept…
We technically saw what would become the Urus in 2012, when Lambo pulled the covers off its SUV concept at the 2012 Beijing motor show. The production model has had a very long gestation period since then but it’s still managed to keep most of the angles, fins and coupe-like silhouette. It’ll be interesting to see how much headroom lurks beneath that slanted roofline.
As late as March 2015, Lamborghini’s chiefs were reportedly still debating whether or not to give the Urus the green light – this wasn’t a decision taken lightly by Lamborghini or its parent company Audi/VW.
2018 Lamborghini Urus – the tech specs
This will be not only Lambo’s first SUV, but the Sant’Agata firm’s first turbocharged car to boot. The original concept car featured a 600bhp V12, but the production car’s powered by a torquey 4.0-litre twin-turbo V8 borrowed from the Audi group – and fuelled by petrol rather than diesel, purists will gladly note.
A plug-in hybrid version is in the pipeline as well, scheduled for 2019.
Its architecture is partially related to that of the current Audi Q7 and Bentley Bentayga, and the next-generation Porsche Cayenne – which bodes well for the Urus’s potential handling prowess.
This is a big deal for Lamborghini, and not just from a brand identity point of view. By the time the Urus goes on sale, it will also have created more than 600 new jobs and doubled the size of Lambo’s production site, from 80,000 sq metres to 150,000.
What’s in a name?
As is Lamborghini tradition, it’s a bullfighting reference. One of the wild ancestors of domestic cattle, Urus bulls were famous for being particularly broad-shouldered – an apt name for a brawny SUV, then.
Launch date, price
Production is expected to start in summer 2017, with production cars ready for the end of the year, or potentially the start of 2018 depending on project timescales.
The Lamborghini Urus is expected to priced from around €170,000, or around £145,000 (based on current exchange rates), making it the most affordable Lamborghini in the current range. It will form the third prong in Lamborghini’s model line-up, together with the Huracan and Aventador. A fourth may follow…
Primary markets for the Urus are expected to be the USA, China and the Middle East, with the United Kingdom, Germany and Russia also expected to take a sizeable proportion of sales.
This isn’t quite Lamborghini’s first SUV, of course – there was the curious 1986 Countach-engined LM002 [pictured below], although the Urus promises to be a little more civilised than the military-influenced ‘Rambo Lambo.’
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