As last gasps for pure internal combustion go, this is a good one.
LamborghiniWe’ve known about Lamborghini’s plans to stop making cars powered solely by internal combustion engines in favor of electrified powertrains. Despite a whole lot of teeth gnashing from enthusiasts, the Italian marque is full speed ahead with such plans as the carmaker enters its final year of pure internal combustion engines. According to remarks CEO Stephan Winkelmann made with Automotive News in an interview published Sunday, 2022 is farewell.
If you want one of the last purely internal combustion cars, and you have the means to buy one, you’re likely out of luck unless you already have an order in. Winkelmann said the carmaker’s 2022 production run is just about sold out. The CEO also confirmed that 2023 models will get the plug-in hybrid treatment, and it plans to embrace electrification further by 2024 with the introduction of the first purely electric Lamborghini. The brand did not immediately return a request for comment on its future plans, nor if we’ll see some sort of final send-off model for the internal combustion engine sans electrification. That’d certainly be in Lamborghini’s wheelhouse.
While the company hashes out its electrified models, the folks in Sant’Agata are still working on locking down a final design for the first fully electric Lamborghini. According to a Tuesday report from Autocar, we could see a a four-door model focused more on daily drivability, rather than speed for the sake of speed.
On the one hand, this is a little sad. A big part of a Lamborghini’s character comes from its yowling maniacal powertrain, and while it’s almost a given at this point that hybrid and electric models will be even more powerful, they could lose a little bit of that classic Lamborghini mechanical style.
Watch this: Driving Lamborghini’s ode to the V12
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