Lamborghini to invest $1.8 bn in EV fleet
Lamborghini is the latest supercar maker to pivot from screaming V-12 combustion engines to electric.
Volkswagen AG’s Italian brand announced on Tuesday that by 2024, it will offer plug-in hybrid versions of each model in its lineup—from the bestselling Urus SUV to the tracksuited Aventador—with the first arriving in two years. Lamborghini also will launch its first vehicle powered purely by battery in the second half of the decade, Chief Executive Officer Stephan Winkelmann said.
The brand will spend €1.5 billion ($1.8 billion) to develop the new fleet that, starting in 2025, will halve emissions across the product line, Winkelmann said in an interview with Bloomberg News. The outlay will be the largest investment ever for Lamborghini.
“The reduction of the CO₂ emissions is interesting to the big brands of the automotive industry, but it’s even more difficult and even more impacting for a super-sports-car manufacturer like Lamborghini,” Winkelmann said. “You need to reduce the emissions, but on the other hand you have to stay a performance-oriented, supersports-car manufacturer without any doubt. So it’s a big challenge for us. In a very simple way, you have to change everything not to change anything.”
VW group, Europe’s largest automaker, has contemplated a possible sale or listing for Lamborghini
under CEO Herbert Diess to focus on its namesake brand and the Audi and Porsche divisions, but the deliberations haven’t won support from key stakeholders. Now the goal is to sketch out a strategy for Lamborghini
that chimes with VW’s push into electric cars powered by batteries and software stacks that can challenge Tesla Inc.
Lamborghini “remains a hidden gem” with a brand value of up to €10 billion, Bloomberg Intelligence analyst Michael Dean said in a report last week. While the carmaker presented a concept for a hybrid dubbed Asterion at the Paris auto show back in 2014, it has remained largely tight-lipped ever since about concrete plans to plug batteries into its low-slung performance vehicles.
Winkelmann said the allelectric model likely will have four seats and two doors, though the configuration of the vehicle hasn’t been finalized. “We are already working on that next step,” he said.