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Lamborghini set an all-time sales record in 2019

Growing demand for the Urus helped Lamborghini set an all-time sales record in 2019. The company delivered 8,205 units, a significant 43% increase compared to 2018, and well over half of its sales came from its only SUV. Annual sales in the Asia-Pacific region grew by 66% to 2,162 units, but the United States remains the company's largest market by a long shot. This partially explains why the Urus (pictured) raced ahead the Aventador S and the Huracan Evo to become Lamborghini's best-selling model by a long shot. The assembly line at Sant'Agata Bolognese, Italy, rolled off 4,962 examples of the SUV in 2019, followed by 2,139 units of the Huracan Evo, which Lamborghini manufactures in a separate building at the same facility. The V12-powered Aventador S also made there logged 1,104 sales, an impressive figure considering it's Lamborghini's oldest and most expensive model. While Lamborghini is celebrating a record year, and its ninth-consecutive year of growth, it previously announced it plans to cap production at 8,000 units in 2020 in order to maintain a degree of exclusivity. "We must not go on growing forever," company boss Stefano Domenicali warned in 2019. It could ultimately reach the 10,000-car threshold, but only after it adds a fourth series-produced model to its range to balance it out. There's no word yet on what form the fourth car will take, though unverified rumors point to an electrified 2+2 tourer. Lamborghini nonetheless entered 2020 on a positive note. It's in the process of developing a hybrid variant of the Urus, it's putting the final touches on the track-bound ST-X variant, and it's shaping the Aventador's successor. It remains confident in its overall outlook, it affirmed in a statement accompanying its 2019 result. Enthusiasts devote a considerable amount of energy to bashing high-riding models made by luxury brands, but sales figures prove entering the SUV segment makes a lot of sense from a business standpoint. In 2019, Porsche delivered 92,055 examples of the Cayenne (a 29% increase over 2018) and its bestselling model was the smaller Macan, which found 99,944 buyers. Rolls-Royce thanked the Cullinan for the 25% jump in sales it recorded in 2019 (up to 5,152 units), while Bentley credited the Bentayga for a 5% increase to 11,006 cars. It's no wonder Aston Martin allegedly ditched the RapidE to focus on the DBX, and Ferrari wants a piece of the pie. Related Video:

Lamborghini Huracan Performante's active aero is the secret to its speed

The most revolutionary real technology at this year's Geneva Motor Show didn't look like it on the show stand. If you squint at the Lamborghini Huracan Performante, it merely looks like a Huracan with a big wing. Up close, you can see the fractal texture of the forged-composite aerodynamic add-ons, but that still doesn't tell you why this car is so special. Lamborghini calls it Aerodinamica Lamborghini Attiva (ALA), or active aerodynamics. This is one of the biggest keys to the Performante's claimed production-car record lap time at the Nurburgring Nordschleife of 6 minutes, 52.01 seconds. The Huracan Performante's number is not without controversy, but I personally care very little about the obsessive phallic-measuring contests that are 'Ring lap times. What's fascinating about the Performante is that, if the lap time is even close to legitimate, it shows that ALA is a major step forward in automotive performance. More than just lap times, the Huracan Performante is an example of why Lamborghini remains special in a world of democratized performance. We sat down to discuss this with Lamborghini's Research and Development Director, Maurizio Reggiani. And one last note on the lap time: Reggiani says with the same temperature and exclusive access to a dry track, "that in this average of speed we can repeat, repeat, repeat, repeat." In previous conversations, Reggiani said that the key difference in performance would come not from horsepower, but weight reduction. For Lamborghini, that means plenty of carbon fiber. But the newest Huracan is not a Superleggera, the old title for the hardcore variant. "Superleggera is too much an objective, a description. Performante is really the DNA of the car. In Italian, Performante means really the best performance," he said. Reggiani continues, "Nothing happened by chance. It's really a building-block approach where you say this can give this contribution, this can give that. Where can you improve something and what is needed to improve something?" That brought them to the active aerodynamics solution, which channels air to stall the front or rear aero elements of the car to change the downforce and drag. Reggiani says, "This can be achieved only with a system that is really light, [has] fast responsiveness. Based on this ...

A car writer's year in new vehicles [w/video]

Christmas is only a week away. The New Year is just around the corner. As 2014 draws to a close, I'm not the only one taking stock of the year that's we're almost shut of. Depending on who you are or what you do, the end of the year can bring to mind tax bills, school semesters or scheduling dental appointments. For me, for the last eight or nine years, at least a small part of this transitory time is occupied with recalling the cars I've driven over the preceding 12 months. Since I started writing about and reviewing cars in 2006, I've done an uneven job of tracking every vehicle I've been in, each year. Last year I made a resolution to be better about it, and the result is a spreadsheet with model names, dates, notes and some basic facts and figures. Armed with this basic data and a yen for year-end stories, I figured it would be interesting to parse the figures and quantify my year in cars in a way I'd never done before. The results are, well, they're a little bizarre, honestly. And I think they'll affect how I approach this gig in 2015. {C} My tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015 it'll be as high as 73. Let me give you a tiny bit of background about how automotive journalists typically get cars to test. There are basically two pools of vehicles I drive on a regular basis: media fleet vehicles and those available on "first drive" programs. The latter group is pretty self-explanatory. Journalists are gathered in one location (sometimes local, sometimes far-flung) with a new model(s), there's usually a day of driving, then we report back to you with our impressions. Media fleet vehicles are different. These are distributed to publications and individual journalists far and wide, and the test period goes from a few days to a week or more. Whereas first drives almost always result in a piece of review content, fleet loans only sometimes do. Other times they serve to give context about brands, segments, technology and the like, to editors and writers. So, adding up the loans I've had out of the press fleet and things I've driven at events, my tally for the year is 68 cars, as of this writing. Before the calendar flips to 2015, it'll be as high as 73. At one of the buff books like Car and Driver or Motor Trend, reviewers might rotate through five cars a week, or more. I know that number sounds high, but as best I can tell, it's pretty average for the full-time professionals in this business.