Aventador

Segment
Coupe

Volkswagen is marching towards the inevitable shift to full electric vehicles with the kind of fervor seen in a company that's been caught lying about how much its products pollute and needs to clean up its image. That philosophy extends across almost the entire lineup-even outliers like Bentley and Lamborghini are doing their part to get corporate emissions averages down-but CarAdvice has just learned that Lamborghini won't go quite as far down that road as we once thought.

This past March, Lamborghini deescalated previous statements that it was working on a full electric hypercar, claiming instead that the prospect of one was not entirely off the table. Now, Lambo's director of research and development, Maurizio Reggiani, has downgraded the threat level of a fully electric Lamborghini once again. "If I look in the next outlook of a super sports car, I see PHEV being the next jump in technology with full electric vehicle are not suitable for a super sports car," Reggiani said. One thing it's important to make note of is why Lamborghini is backing off from an electric supercar. It has nothing to do with straight line performance, as cars like the Rimac Concept One have shown the world.

Instead, it has to do with the simple limitations that come with the technology. "In terms of maximum speed, packaging, weight of the battery and for this reason we are looking for the next generation of super sport vehicle will be focussed on PHEV technology where we wish the weight of the battery and packaging can decrease." Adding PHEV tech to a Lamborghini would pose a larger challenge since the weight of two power plants is larger than that of just an engine and gearbox or just a battery and electric motors. Still, Lamborghini needs to find a way to bridge the gap between V12 and V10 emotion and whisper-quiet electric motors. It plans to debut PHEV tech in the upcoming Urus SUV only to migrate to the Aventador's successor by 2019 or 2020.