Lamborghini joins boom in supercar sport-utes
Supercar makers have long known that parked next to that snarling Lamborghini, racing-red Ferrari, or stately Bentley at some of the globe’s toniest addresses is a practical SUV. With the sport utility vehicle market growing by leaps and bounds, they increasingly want in on those profits.
Lamborghini unveiled the once-improbable Urus SUV last week at its headquarters in Sant’Agata, Italy, where the supercar maker owned by the Volkswagen group is expanding the factory to meet utility vehicle demand.
The Urus enters a luxury field crowded with the Mercedes GClass, the Bentley Bentayga and the trail-blazing Porsche Cayenne — and soon to be joined by Aston Martin, Rolls-Royce and in all probability, Ferrari.
Yianni Charalambous placed an order even before he saw the Urus in person. He expects to park it next to his Lamborghini Aventador supercar come September.
“I wanted a double-Lamborghini garage,” Charalambous said, growing impatient while a technical glitch delayed the unveiling ceremony on the Sant’Agata factory floor.
“I have always had a four-by-four. And I have always had a Lamborghini,” the Londoner said. “I have had Range Rovers. I wanted something different.”
Lamborghini dabbled in the SUV market in the 1980s and 1990s with the boxy LM 002, which sported a body shape not all that different from the Hummer’s. But the Hummer’s lower price was hard to beat. Lamborghini ended up only building a few hundred of the LM 002.
“Now we live in a different world,” John Giunta, a Lamborghini dealer in Sarasota, Fla., said. “The lines of this is more modernized, and something of this price point can survive now.”
The 32 Lamborghini dealers in the United States already have orders ranging from 10 to 25, Giunta said. In the U.S., the Urus starts at US$200,000 (168,718 euros.) The European base price is just under 171,500 euros (US$203,322.)
The Urus boasts the high centre-of-gravity which has made SUVs so popular, but Lamborghini chief engineer Maurizio Reggiani said that the height can be adjusted to a lower drive for the track or higher for off-road performance.
The Urus can go from 0 to 100 kilometres per hour (62 mph) in 3.6 seconds and brake from 100 kilometres an hour to a stop in 33.7 metres (111 feet.) At a maximum speed of 305 kilometres an hour (189.5 mph), Lamborghini boasts that it is “the fastest SUV in the world.”
Analysts say that the move into SUVs has become a natural fit for most brands, despite the risk of alienating aficionados.
“I think if you look at those brands’ image, I think you would look at an SUV — especially a Lamborghini — as almost a sellout move. I don’t think that is the case anymore,” Jeff Schuster, senior vice-president at LMC Automotive in Detroit.
From being non-existent in 2006, high-end SUVs have more than quadrupled in sales since 2010, from 4,700 units to almost 21,000 units in 2016, driven by the Mercedes G-Class and Bentley Bentayga, according to IHS Automotive.
The entry of the Urus along with the planned Aston Martin DBX and Rolls-Royce “High Side Vehicle” is expected to push those numbers up to 29,300 by 2020.
Even Ferrari is considering entering the category, with a decision expected early next year, which could leave McLaren as the only holdout among supercars.
Luxury SUVs are merely following the mass-market trend. SUVs are the fastest-growing overall segment of the car market, tripling in sales in a decade from just under 8 million units in 2006 to nearly 26.5 million units last year. SUV sales are forecast by IHS Automotive to grow by another 28 per cent to over 34 million units by 2020.