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2020 Lamborghini Urus Road Test | How many bags of steer manure can it haul?

The question posed in the headline probably got your attention, as a headline should. You might also be wondering how many wet, muddy golden retrievers the 2020 Lamborghini Urus can carry home from a swim. Or how many seat-kicking Girl Scouts will drop their ice cream cones as you fling them around in your Urus on their way to a field trip. Or how many board-feet you can load while on a Lamborghini lumber run to Home Depot. And the answer to all of the above is: Beats me. If you think I tried any of that in a car with a $200,000 base price — $270,000 as tested — then youÂ’d be almost as nuts as me if I had. Most of those activities were probably specifically forbidden in the fine print of the 18-page loan agreement anyway. Yes, the Lamborghini Urus is an SUV. (ItÂ’s pronounced “Ooh-rous,” by the way.) No, it is not that kind of SUV, the kind that has “utility” as its middle name. Nobody who buys this is going to get it anywhere close to fertilizer, mud, ice cream or splinters. Nobody is cross-shopping the Urus against a Highlander or Explorer. It is, instead, an extreme expression of the quest for more power, more luxury, and the craze for crossovers. Auto brands, as they are wont to do, are building the high-riding vehicles that people want, which happen to be vastly profitable. Ne plus ultra brands such as Rolls-Royce, Bentley and Lamborghini are not immune to that lure, and so they are now offering SUVs with arch luxury, uber performance and the most hoity brand cachet. Just wait until the Ferrari Purosangue hits the streets. And sure enough, the SUV formula works for the high rollers, too. Lamborghini sold more than 8,200 vehicles worldwide last year, an annual increase of 43%. And thatÂ’s because 5,000 of them were the Urus. The window sticker says 70% of the carÂ’s content is from Germany — put another way, itÂ’s mostly an Audi. But the 30% that is Lamborghini is what makes its base price nearly three times the $68,200 base price of the mechanically related Audi Q8.  When the opportunity arose to drive a Urus for a weekend, I puzzled over what exactly to do with it. With more lowly SUVs or trucks in the press fleet, auto writers typically load and haul their families and stuff to see how well the utility vehicle in question does its job in everyday life. But thatÂ’s not possible with the Urus. You canÂ’t in good conscience get the thing dirty, or risk a scuff or scratch.

Join us for a closer look at the Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato

Unveiled in November 2022, the Sterrato is the final and arguably wildest evolution of the Lamborghini Huracan. The limited-edition coupe isn't scheduled to enter production until February 2023, but Autoblog got to check it out in the flesh at a preview event held in Denmark. The first all-terrain variant of the Huracan looks just as cool in person as it does in Lamborghini's official photos. Seeing it up close reveals some of the finer design details that the press shots didn't show, like the subtle "Sterrato" logo on both roof rails and the exposed bolts that hold on the wheel arch flares. I also got to take a peek in the engine bay for a look at the other side of the roof-mounted intake system. While the Huracan STO also features a roof-mounted scoop, it's used to channel cooling air into the engine bay. Rouven Mohr, the head of Lamborghini's research and development department, told Autoblog that his team re-imagined the scoop as the intake system's inlet after realizing that dust clogs the air filters via the stock, side-mounted intake system. While that's not a huge deal in Los Angeles traffic, it's important off the pavement because the Sterrato's purpose isn't to crawl over boulders; it was designed to go very fast on unpaved surfaces. "Its purpose is fast off-roading," Mohr told me. "In my mind, off-road you're always going a little bit slow and climbing up somewhere. This is not the intention; this car can also climb but its intention is going sideways on gravel, rally-style." Zooming out, the Sterrato is a racing livery away from looking like a rally car. It's considerably taller than the other Huracan variants, and it looks even higher in person than it does in photos. If you see it in the right light you can spot some of the underbody hardware between the wheels and the arches in spite of the meaty tires. The side skirts and rear diffuser have been given a more off-road-ready design as well. We'll need to be patient to find out what the Sterrato is like to drive, but it's a recipe for fun on paper. It's powered by a version of the STO's naturally-aspirated, 5.2-liter V10 engine that develops 610 horsepower at 8,000 rpm and 417 pound-feet of torque at 6,500 rpm; the revised intake system is to blame for the 21-horse drop. Lamborghini quotes a 3.4-second sprint from zero to 62 mph and a top speed of 162 mph.

2018 Lamborghini Huracan Performante Spyder First Drive Review | Cheating the wind

NAPA, Calif. — A long, fast, right-hand sweeper appears a few hundred feet ahead, but I don't tap the brakes. Instead I decide to trust the aerodynamics. And when the Lamborghini Huracan Performante Spyder slices through corner after corner with zero drama, the smile that naturally occurs when driving something so potent gets incrementally more maniacal. From behind the wheel, the driver can't see what's happening with the front splitter and rear wing. All the action takes place underneath the wedge-shaped bodywork. Electric actuators open and close air pathways that either push the Performante Spyder into the ground for the best possible cornering performance, or cancel out that drag-inducing downforce so that the car can accelerate as quickly as possible and hit a higher maximum speed. I have good reason to put faith in Aerodinamica Lamborghini Attiva, which I'll henceforth and mercifully shorten to its initials ALA — a system we've already experienced on our first and second drives of the Performante Coupe. I'd been given the full rundown on the bits and pieces of forged composite that make it all work, the most impressive of which allow aero vectoring from the wing to apply downforce only to the rear tire that needs it most. But it wasn't until I was behind the wheel on a particularly twisty ribbon of asphalt outside of Napa, California, that I was able to put ALA to the test. I progressively took corners faster, building up speed and pushing myself harder into the grippy bolsters of the Alcantara seat. The Performante Spyder stayed as flat as the plains of Kansas, and never gave one hint of breaking traction from the front or the rear. Straight-line acceleration is just as impressive. Yes, at 3.1 seconds, the Spyder is .2 seconds slower to 62 miles per hour than the Performante Coupe. Unless you're racing for pink slips, that's imperceptible and meaningless in the real world. Keep the throttle pinned and you'll hit a top speed of 202 mph, which matches that of the Coupe. What those numbers don't tell you, though, is how it actually feels to lunge forward with all-wheel-drive traction from a dead stop and sense no slowdown in the rate of acceleration until you're too scared to keep your foot planted any longer. I suggest keeping your head pressed firmly against its rest before trying for yourself. The naturally aspirated V10 engine sitting directly behind the passenger compartment spins out 640 horsepower and 443 pound-feet of torque.