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6 things you should know about the Lamborghini Urus

Lamborghini has finally revealed its second SUV in history. The road-oriented vehicle has a 641-horsepower twin-turbo V8 and highly creased body panels. There are plenty of interesting factoids packed into its four-door shape. We highlight the most interesting of them, here. It's named after a breed of cattle. Though many Lamborghinis have been named after specific fighting bulls, this one is named after an entire breed. The extinct breed is called urus, or sometimes aurochs, that is closely related to Spanish fighting bulls of today. It's the first Lamborghini with active roll control. When a car gets tall and heavy, it wants to lean a lot more when cornering. To counter that, Lamborghini fitted the Urus with an active roll control system to help keep the body flat going through turns. It's also one of a number of technologies meant to improve handling, such as adaptive damping, rear-wheel steering ( borrowed from the Aventador S) and torque vectoring on the rear differential. It has huge wheels and brakes. Standard wheels on the Urus are 21 inches, but for those with a desire for bigger dubs, there are optional 23-inch models. These wheels are stopped by standard carbon ceramic rotors. The fronts are 17.3 inches in diameter, and the rears are 14.5 inches. It has the best weight-to-power ratio of any SUV. Besides having the highest claimed top speed for an SUV, and acceleration on par with the 707-horsepower Grand Cherokee Trackhawk, Lamborghini claims the Urus has the best weight-to-power ratio of any SUV on the market. That ratio, with the SUV's roughly 4,850 pound curb weight and 641 horsepower, is 7.57 pounds per horsepower. It is worth noting that the aforementioned Grand Cherokee Trackhawk is still close with a ratio of 7.59 pounds per horsepower. It can be mostly rear-wheel drive, but not fully. The big Lambo is all-wheel-drive all the time, with its Torsen center differential providing a default torque split of 40 percent to the front, and 60 percent to the rear. This can change all the way up to 87.5 percent to the rear depending on conditions, or it can shift 70 percent of the torque to the front. Its chassis is all steel and aluminum. Unlike the Lamborghini's sports cars that use extensive carbon fiber in the chassis, either for the passenger cell in the case of the Aventador, or for reinforcement as in the Huracan, the Urus has a steel and aluminum chassis. Related Video: This content is hosted by a third party.

Lamborghini invades Miami with Aventador parade, high-speed runs at airport [w/video]

Lamborghini is only starting to throttle the engines on its 50th anniversary celebrations. The company lined up fifty of its Italian jobs for a cannonball run down the south runway at the Miami International Airport, the Aventador Roadster breaking 200 miles per hour, then ran them all through the streets of Miami to be properly introduced to one of their most ardent clienteles.
Contrary to the appearance of the image above, no airplanes had to wait to taxi behind the ground-based flyers. Not that any of them would have had to wait long, though, since the 700-horsepower Aventador Roadsters were exceeding the lift-off speeds of commercial airliners by at least 30 mph.
There's a press release and a video below, along with a gallery of high-res photos of the day's events. Enjoy.

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.