Supercar anticipates your desires
Lamborghini speedster can make you think you know what you’re doing
It all used to be so simple. If you wanted to build a supercar, all you needed was oodles of horsepower and a bunch of grip. For technology, a big engine and even bigger tires usually fit the bill.
OK, so there might have been a little more to it than that.
Maybe you threw in a soupçon of aerodynamics, a hint of brakes and a wee bit of traction control to make sure all that horsepower didn’t run away from you. But whatever the final result, the formula for supercar success always remained the same: make the car respond to the driver’s demands.
Now, if Lamborghini’s new Huracán Evo is any indication, the darned thing has to anticipate those demands as well.
Indeed, Maurizio Reggiani, Lamborghini’s effusive chief technical officer, says this anticipation thing is the future of supercars.
And these days, with 600 horsepower the norm and 700+ becoming increasingly commonplace, there is much to anticipate. Set aside for the moment that the new Huracán Evo just got a boost to 640 horsepower — about which Lamborghini makes much ado, but it’s just a repackaged Performante engine — there’s also a new torque-vectoring version of the company’s all-wheel-drive system, an updated version of its semi-active magneto-rheological suspension, and for the first time in a Huracan, four-wheel steering.
Impressive technologies all, but needing close supervision.
With all those individual technologies vying for attention/control/dominance, it is essential that they co-operate.
Singly, each is an upgrade, but unsynchronized of minimal value. Indeed, marques far less extolled than Lamborghini have boasted similar technology for some time, often with only middling results.
Enter Lamborghini Dinamica Veicolo Integrata — Reggiani calls it the “brain” that “controls every aspect of the car’s dynamic behaviour” — which, and this is where the chief technical officer’s claims get a little phantasmagorical, “anticipates the driver’s needs and his, or her, next move.”
Essentially, it gathers so much data so quickly — every 20 milliseconds or so — that it can predict what the driver is trying to do even before they are finished executing the action.
So intuitive is it on a racetrack that, at the first tromp on the brake, even before you can get full pedal to the metal, the Evo will have dialed down the torque vectoring and adjusted the suspension in anticipation of some serious speed scrubbing. Begin feathering the gas while steering sharply, and this latest Huracán predicts you just might want a touch of tail-wagging oversteer, and stands at the ready with relaxed traction control and a firming of the rear dampers.
All this anticipation can seem a little uncanny. Where the original Huracán was unapologetic about understeer, the Evo happily oversteers on a whiff of throttle.
Hang the tail out and it’s almost as if the car has a plan rather than waiting for you to react. Standard traction-control systems play a herky-jerky catch-and-release game when you’re sliding the rear end, the engine pumping out a staccato burp-burp as it cuts ignition trying to modulate power.
The Evo, on the other hand, performs the most lurid slides with such smoothness that it’s easy to start fooling yourself into thinking that you know what you’re doing.
Again, all this goodness is the result of the Evo’s “brain.”
None of these individual talents — torque-vectoring, four-wheel steering or adaptive suspension — would matter a fig if they weren’t working in harmony. There have been plenty of cars boasting fourwheel steering or torque vectoring — even a precious few with both — and none have displayed the Lambo’s uncanny abilities.
Indeed, if there is one thing about this new Evo — and the Performante before it — that impresses, it’s how much Lamborghini accomplishes with so little.
The additions to the new Huracán are, in the grand scheme of supercar innovation, fairly pedestrian. And yet its performance enhancement is more than the sum of its parts.
The addition of a “brain” has rendered this newest Lambo one of the most entertaining, if not quite the fastest, supercars around.
No doubt you will have noticed that I have paid precious little attention to the new Huracán Evo’s engine. That’s because it’s basically the Performante’s 5.2-L V-10 with a fuel-injection re-map.
That said, when I say it’s “the same as it ever was,” please remember that I am talking about 640 hp that screams to 8,000 rpm with enough élan to make you wonder if saving the planet really is worth going electric.
The other Huracán update of note is the new 8.4-inch touch screen, the first such infotainment system, says Reggiani, in the supercar portion of Lamborghini’s fleet. It’s a decent affair, full of apps and seat-heater functions.
There’s even a way nifty digital readout of all those new technologies; both torque-vectoring AWD and four-wheel-steering systems can be monitored on a dedicated performance app.
It’s not a bad system, but the self-congratulation proffered by Lamborghini smacked a little of my 85-year-old dad thinking he was “with it” when he got his first flip-screen Motorola. Congratulations for finally creeping into the 21st century, but there’s still a certain Listen-here-Sonny-Jim to Lamborghini’s profession of modernity.
The 2020 Huracán Evo will be available later this year, priced at $313,529.