holy cow

If you can’t beat them… Lamborghini joins the SUV set

Able to gobble up roads, trails, and dunes… as well as your nest egg.

Jim Resnick – Jan 17, 2018 11:04 am | 123

The SUV is now the dominant lifeform in the automotive world, and even Lamborghini is getting in on the action. Credit: Jim Resnick

Let me pre-empt you.

“Why?” you ask. “You’re Lamborghini, not Range Rover!”

Before you throw darts, shame and shade on the idea of a Lamborghini SUV, understand that the company expects that. The reality that sports car purists lament—if there are any left—is that as a niche carmaker, Lamborghini must always be looking for viable new niches. And preferably find them before others, or at least ride the first wave into the marketplace. Thus, with a seemingly insatiable appetite for SUVs of both modest and obscene cost and power, we have the new Urus (which gets its name for an extinct, wild, long-horned ox thought to be the progenitor of modern cattle). To leave a niche like the hyper-performance SUV untouched is to leave poker money on the table.

Indeed, a 650hp (478 kW), 4,800lb (2,200kg) Italian five-seat exotic that can reach 62mph (100km/h) in 3.6 seconds and top out at 190mph (305km/h) might be obscene to some, whereas a full electric SUV that weighs about 600 pounds more and is capable of similar road-scorching numbers might not. And the Urus will no doubt consume conspicuous quantities of fuel, but see the bigger picture: the environmental impact of a year’s worth of Uruses will be negligible compared to, say, full-size trucks. Fewer than 3,000 of the Urus SUVs will be built per year beginning late this summer, where Ford finished out 2017 with 900,000 F-series trucks.

Also, for those questioning the veracity of a new Lambo SUV, it’s actually the company’s second SUV; the first was their outlandish and rectilinear LM002, of which 301 were built between 1982 and 1988.

Being a Lamborghini, the Urus does not hold back on the visuals, but being an SUV, it must offer decent room inside, and it does so despite being as squat in height as possible. Without badges, you’d still recognize the slopes, slats, triangular gamma-like shapes, and glowering lights as nothing else but Lamborghini. We spent several hours with Chief Technical Officer Maurizio Reggiani during the Detroit Auto Show, where the Urus debuted at the Detroit Museum of Contemporary Art and will start arriving in American dealerships by this September. (The European on-sale date will be earlier, likely this April.)

Enough power to burn rubber on- and off-road

At its heart is a 4.0L twin-turbo V8, the engine block that the Urus shares with other products in the larger VW Group family. Chief Technical Officer Maurizio Reggiani told us, though, that virtually everything else, including the crank, rods, pistons, heads, inlet plumbing, cam profiles, and twin-scroll—or dual inlet channel—turbochargers, is all specific to the Urus and results not just in 650hp (478kW) but also in 627lb-ft (850Nm) of torque at 2,250 rpm, a figure simply not achievable with natural aspiration at such a low engine speed. And low-rpm torque is at a huge premium in an SUV that has off-road and sand capabilities.

Also, to that end, the Urus uses an eight-speed automatic with a conventional torque converter in order to cope with off-roading and with such prodigious torque at low rpms; a dual-clutch transmission would chew through clutches hourly with the amount of slippage an off-roading transmission endures, especially with this level of torque output.

The Urus also employs a central Torsen differential that varies the normal torque split of 40/60 front/rear to maximums of 70/30 and 13/87, depending on conditions and driver-adjustable settings. It can also vector torque at the rear differential, not by selective braking at one side, but by reapportioning the power directly, which improves traction depending on available grip but not at the cost of braking capacity and heat generation.

The rear suspension can also dial in up to three degrees of steering in-phase at high speed to improve stability and out-of-phase with front steering at low speed for tighter maneuverability. Reggiani suggests this has the effect of shortening the wheelbase by nearly 24 inches (600mm). Air suspension and active anti-roll bars that can de-couple from the suspension help the Urus perform at the extremes on the track and off-road when drastic suspension articulation is needed. And the brakes are gigantic, with 17.3-inch (440mm) diameter carbon ceramic rotors wrapped in ten-piston calipers in front, plus 14.6mm (370mm) rotors in the rear. “There will be no fading with these brakes under any circumstance,” Reggiani told us, in a flourish of understatement.

The Urus won’t be shy on technology, either, and will come with Level 2 semi-autonomous driver assistance. I then asked what the performance requirements are, beyond the numbers, of a Lamborghini SUV.

“It is simple,” Reggiani told me: “To be the fastest, and we will be, but also to be the supersport car of SUVs, which means not only to be fastest but also to work well every day for families as well as individuals.”

Lamborghini is also not afraid of fraternal competition with Bentley’s recent Bentayga entering the market ahead of the Urus, nor from Porsche and its upper-end Cayenne models, nor from Range Rovers. “We are creating this class of car and we are the only one in it,” Reggiani firmly claims. “People who shop for other top-class SUVs are totally different customers, so [these vehicles do] not hurt us,” he says. “And we will be taking a run at the [Nurburgring] Nordschleife when the weather gets better, so stay tuned for that.”

Starting price will be $200,000, though, with all the options, the Urus will top $260,000.

Reggiani also stated that there is a second SUV in the works for Lamborghini, which will use a plug-in hybrid drivetrain exclusively and will arrive around 2020.

At which time Ferrari product planners’ heads will explode.

Jim Resnick

A veteran of journalism, product planning and communications in the automotive and music space, Jim reports, critiques and lectures on autos, music and culture.

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