Yellow / Convertible / Lp560-4 on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Uber adds supercar rides in Singapore

Order a ride through Uber and you'll have a choice between what kind of car you want or need: Uber Black for standard fare, Uber X for the lowest cost available, Uber Taxi to order a regular cab, Uber SUV if you need to move more people or even Uber Lux if you want a luxury town car service. But customers in Singapore now have another option: to be picked up in a Lamborghini or Maserati. The pilot program launched in collaboration with Dream Drive will allow customers to be picked up in either a Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder or a Maserati GranTurismo to get around the Southeast Asian city-state. Ordering up the Maser will set customers back 165 Singapore Dollars (equivalent of $120 USD) for the first 15 minutes and 7 SGD ($5.10) for every subsequent minute. The Lambo gets the same per-minute rate but begs a higher 200 SGD ($146) base rate. Uber and Dream Drive were even offering free rides over the weekend to launch the initiative. Those prices make riding around in an Italian exotic pretty pricey, especially since you don't actually get to drive them – just ride shotgun. But then cars are quite expensive to begin with in Singapore, where it costs over half a million in US dollars to get a new Maserati in the first place. News Source: Uber via GTspirit.com Green Lamborghini Maserati Supercars Uber singapore

Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato off-roader is a heavy-metal swan song

Lamborghini's Huracan has almost reached retirement age, and it's going out with one hell of a bang. The model's last evolution may be the wildest yet: called Sterrato, it's an off-roading supercar with a rugged-looking design, a big V10, and a desert-ready suspension system. If the design looks familiar, it's likely because Lamborghini previewed the Sterrato by unveiling a close-to-production concept in June 2019. Some of the finer design details have evolved over the past three years, but the basic idea hasn't: The Sterrato remains recognizable as a member of the Huracan range, but it's characterized by styling cues you'd expect to find on an off-roader such as flared wheel arches, an additional pair of lights on the front end (they will be covered on American-spec cars because they can't be homologated), and roof rails. The coupe sits higher than the regular Huracan and rides on 19-inch wheels. Check out the roof-mounted scoop; it's not there for show. "In the STO, the scoop is functional but it's there to help with cooling; the air intakes are on the sides [of the car]. In this car, the air scoop is the air intake, and we have completely revised the intake system because during testing we realized that if you drive very fast off-road, with a lot of direction changes, for a long time then dust blocks the air filters too fast. We decided to close the side entries and added the air scoop to catch the cleanest possible air, and we optimized the air filter itself. This is the reason why the Sterrato has "only" 610 horsepower. It's the same engine as the STO, complete with titanium valves, but the reduction of power is due to the fact that the redesigned air intake system has a bigger air pressure drop," Rouven Mohr, the head of Lamborghini's research and development department, told Autoblog. Speaking of the engine, power for the Sterrato comes from a naturally-aspirated, 5.2-liter V10 tuned to develop 610 horsepower at 8,000 rpm and 417 pound-feet of torque at 6,500 rpm. Mid-mounted, it spins the four wheels via a seven-speed dual-clutch automatic transmission and a mechanical locking rear differential. Lamborghini quotes a 0-to-62 mph time of 3.4 seconds and a 162-mph top speed. For context, the aforementioned STO takes 3 seconds flat to reach 62 mph and tops out at 193 mph — it can't go very far off the pavement, though. Building a Huracan capable of sprinting across the desert required making significant changes to the suspension system.

Lamborghini's path to the future is paved with forged composites

As far back as 1983, Lamborghini has been researching carbon fiber for automotive use. The automaker felt confident enough in its ability to work with the high-tech material in 1985 that a team led by Maurizio Reggiani, now the Lamborghini Board Member in charge of Research and Development, crafted a revolutionary Countach with a chassis made almost entirely of hand-laid carbon fiber. The result was spectacular in that the car's chassis weighed about half of its all-metal counterpart. It turned out that first foray into carbon fiber was just as spectacular when it was finally tested for crashworthiness, but in a completely different way. Catastrophic would be an appropriate word, according to Paolo Feraboli, who now leads Lambo's brand-new Advanced Composite Structures Laboratory in Seattle, Washington. Proving how far Lamborghini has come since that ill-fated carbon-fiber Countach Evoluzione, Feraboli told us during the ACSL's grand opening that today's Aventador, which boasts a high-tech carbon chassis, aced its very first crash test in 2009. Chalk that success up to high-tech computer modeling and the practical application of lessons learned over several decades of trial and error. The dull red monocoque of that crashed Aventador now hangs on the wall at the ACSL like a functional piece of art, a reminder of Lamborghini's cutting-edge milestones of the past. Lamborghini's future will be hewn from what the company calls forged composites. First seen on the stunning Sesto Elemento Concept from the 2010 Paris Motor Show, the patented carbon-forging process forgoes hand-laid sheets, injected resins, and high-heat autoclaves. Instead, wads of randomly oriented carbon fibers that sort of resemble the kind of dough you'd use to make pasta undergo a three-minute press inside a mold. The resulting parts are just as strong as other carbon-fiber bits, but can be mass-produced at a fraction of the cost. While it's true that cost is often a secondary consideration for high-end supercars, it's still relevant. By reducing the cost and increasing the scale of composite pieces, Lamborghini can then afford to spend more money on other parts of the car. It's not just body panels and chassis components that Lamborghini thinks it can build using forged composite technology. The Sesto Elemento featured forged-composite suspension control arms that haven't yet made it into production, but probably will soon.