Lamborghini’s Next Hypercar: Is This What it Will Look Like?
More than any other automaker, you get what you pay for with Lamborghini. As Ferrari finds ways to grow its bottom line while maintaining an air of respectability and McLaren has a downright German clinical approach to its supercars, Lamborghini is a screaming assault on good taste and discretion. Even under Volkswagen ownership, the company is still famous for its Hi-Liter-colored, wedge-shaped ego-mobiles that at the end of the day (if your heart isn’t made of stone), still probably appeal to your inner child.
Somewhat unfortunately, no one knows this better than Lamborghini, and the company delights in every opportunity to celebrate its own history. It’s the reason why it celebrated its 50th birthday with the Egoista (Italian for ego), a one-seat hypercar designed to look like an F-117 but ended up looking like a life-size Hot Wheels car. Did our inner eight year old kind of love it? Sure. Would we really want to be seen driving it around? Probably not.
But there are plenty of people out there who wholly embrace the “Lamborghini lifestyle,” and will pay a small fortune for something that’s rarer, louder, and taunts the police to arrest its driver far more than any other supercar out there. This is true even for Lambos that haven’t even been built yet, like the Centenario, a special car built to honor the 100th birthday of founder Ferruccio Lamborghini. Just 20 coupes and 20 convertibles will be built, and they’ve all been accounted for for months. The company even showed a hologram of the car to prospective owners at last year’s Pebble Beach Concours. Now patent images purported to be of the Centenario have emerged, and let’s just say they’re not pretty.
After being announced last year, a few key details have emerged about the Centenario. It would be based on the Huracan platform, use the 6.5 liter V12 from the Aventador (possibly cranking out over 750 horsepower), and cost over $2 million. Now reconcile that with these patent images, filed by Lamborghini with the European Union last October. It certainly shares its design language with current models, and it certainly looks like it could be built on a stretched Huracan platform, but you can’t say that it really looks… good.
There’s a classic Mad Magazine article called “If Kids Designed Their Own X-Mas Toys” that we can’t stop thinking about when it comes to this design. Until Dieselgate, the Volkswagen Auto Group had the largest design budget in the world – have times gotten this bad over there? With previous patent leaks (see the 2017 Honda Civic), the renderings end up being pretty spot-on compared to the finished product. With these images, we’re not sure all four wheels could touch the road at the same time.
So on top of incredible horsepower, exclusivity, and a price tag that could net you your own island, we now know that the Centenario will likely come with an unfortunate widow’s peak, be available as a kit for your Pontiac Fiero, and come standard with a rear diffuser that doubles as a rototiller. Of course the finished product will look better when it’s unveiled at next month’s Geneva Motor Show, but seen naked in patent drawings, it seems safe to say that the Centenario probably won’t go down as one of Lambo’s greatest hits. It’ll probably look great as a Hot Wheels car though.
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