Lamborghini’s biggest EV challenge? Not being seen as “fake,” says CTO.

Lamborghini has now launched its second plug-in hybrid. The first was the V-12-powered Revuelto, a $600,000 supercar with 1,001 hp (746 kW), all-wheel drive, and three electric motors, which debuted last year. It can hit 60 mph (98 km/h) in about two seconds and can achieve a top speed of 217 mph (350 km/h). But if we’re relying on Lamborghini’s hybridization to save the planet from melting, we’re burying our heads in oil-soaked sand. True, its newest hybrid, the Urus SE, can travel 37 miles (60 km) on EV power alone, and hybridizing it cuts emissions by 80 percent. Since the non-hybrid Urus V8 gets a combined 16 mpg (14.7 L/100 km), this shouldn’t be considered a major triumph.

A far bigger deal would be if brands like Lamborghini could crack the code on passion—making what they already do but with electric vehicles, somehow without sanding away the sex appeal.

Lamborghini has committed to having at least two EVs on the road by 2030, and it has already shown the Lanzador EV concept, a kind of hypercar crossover. But Lamborghini Chief Technology Officer Rouven Mohr, who sat down with us to discuss the Urus SE, says that technically, there’s still an issue with EVs retaining the bombast that makes the Italian super sports car brand what it is. Counterintuitively, Mohr argued that AI might enable this next leap.

Ars: Lay out, philosophically, what makes a Lamborghini today—what separates it from other brands in the supercar segments?

Mohr: You can measure a lot of things in numbers. There are a lot of cars that can enable a super-pro driver to achieve a super lap time. But this is not our philosophy. Because for the majority of customers, that car will feel boring because they have to drive it so far away from the limit. And if you instead make the car too sharp, it would scare most drivers. The fastest car for the best time is not our positioning. Our philosophy is always a kind of smile generator. We want to take the skills of the driver and guide them, based on algorithms or the possibilities that today, in new cars, we have with active systems, to generate this “wow” effect.

How to generate “wow”

Ars: That brings us to the Revuelto and the new hybrid Urus SE. These give you something new—instant torque from electric motors. And as you suggest, algorithms might enable more precise "wow" generation.

Yes. Electrification lets you control more of the dynamics of the car. We write our own software for the management, not just mechanical systems like on the V8 Urus, but more actively during cornering with the hybrid. We manage the torque to the front wheel and also the torque left-right, and what happens in the algorithm is you have a driver input and you have a forecasted trajectory of the car. And in the Urus SE compared to the Urus, we have a lot more freedom; it’s comparing a mechanical four-wheel-drive system where you don't have the possibility to decouple the front axle, whereas in the SE, we can come closer to our interpretation of driving power.