To put it bluntly, the supercar industry is going one way, Lamborghini another. But according to CEO Stephan Winkelmann, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, for now.
Winkelmann was recently interviewed by Car and Driver, and they covered some very interesting topics such as the sub-$200K supercar segment, electric supercars, a larger car line-up, SUVs and the lifespan of the naturally aspirated V12 engine.
If you’re a car enthusiast, it’s really encouraging to hear Lambo’s top man utter the phrase “never say never” when confronted with the sub-200K supercar question. However he did follow up by saying “At the time, we are not planning to do something like this. When we speak about derivatives inside the models then there might be, here and there, some opportunities. But basically, we’re not planning to do a new car for this level.”
What this means is that at the moment, they’re not planning on building a brand new model just so they can take on the likes of the McLaren 570S, however by saying that there might be derivatives to consider, there’s still a chance something could happen. What that something is, nobody knows. Perhaps a V8 or V6 version of the Huracan, so they can price it under $200,000? Your guess would be as good as ours.
As for the Asterion plug-in hybrid we saw in Paris, it was only a “technological demonstrator, this was the idea behind it. We wanted to showcase what would happen if today we needed to adapt to regulations that are coming up. Therefore, it was a just a technology demonstrator, there is no plan to do it.”
The beauty of such a thing is knowing that when the time comes (and it will come), Lamborghini will be ready to respond without falling behind any of their direct rivals.
Another thing that caught our eye was Winkelmann saying that CO2 emissions aren’t on their minds as of yet because “the average mileage is very low, and therefore our customers buy into the brand, they buy one of our models because they want to have a dream fulfilled. They want to have something that is exceeding their expectations, and this is important. They use their car once in a while to go out in the evening, use it for a trip for a weekend. We are not impacting the CO2 emissions of this world.”
We’re glad to see Lamborghini sticking to their guns, while still being open to change – if they ever conclude that it would offer their cars a significant performance gain.
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