The Lamborghini Aventador SVJ Will be the Last Lambo to Sport a Stand-Alone V-12

TopSpeed

By Kirby Garlitos

Published Aug 1, 2018

All future Lamborghinis will have some form of electric assistance

The Lamborghini Aventador SVJ is making history every time it makes the news. Hot on the heels of setting the fastest lap time of a production car at the Nurburgring, the Aventador SVJ has a new historical tie attached to its belt. The 760-horsepower Lambo will be the last ever Lamborghini to proudly use a naturally aspirated V-12 engine without any electric aids attached to it. All future Lamborghinis from this point, whether it’s using a V-12 or a V-10 engine, will be electrically assisted.

While this may come as a shock to some people, there have been rumblings from Lamborghini that this would happen, or at least something like this would happen. It’s become even more apparent with the accelerated development of hybrid technology, one that has forced the entire industry to completely reinvent the way it develops future powertrains for future models.

Lamborghini isn’t exempt from that, though it did try for a while to resist it in the name of striking to its roots. But as they say, if you don’t want to get left behind by technology, you need to at least keep up with it. That’s what Lamborghini is doing here, and that’s what it plans to do moving forward.

At the moment, Lamborghini doesn’t have a full-blown hybrid-powered supercar that’s out in production. But Lamborghini CEO Stefano Domenicali has already made it clear that the successors of the Aventador and Huracan supercars, which are due in around 2020 and 2022, respectively, will be powered by plug-in hybrid powertrains.

Lamborghini will have to address certain issues involved in using hybrid engines, most prominently being the extra weight it’s going to be carrying. As appealing as it is to have batteries and motors that give out more power, they come at the expense of more weight. And if you know what Lamborghini stands for, weight is the nemesis. In order to address this, Lamborghini’s use of hybrid assistance will be limited to a small electric-only range that should help the company reduce its average emissions. That means that a lot of the work will still be done by the mighty V-12s and V-10s.

Yes, this will be a silent Lamborghini, but push the accelerator, and the engine will come,” Lamborghini’s chief technical officer, Maurizio Reggiano, told Top Gear a few months ago. “Silence will only last for some seconds then comes the sound.”

That reassurance should come in handy for Lamborghini purists, a lot of whom haven’t been pleased by the automaker’s about-face on the issue. But technology waits for no one, even an Italian automaker that prides itself on being one of the most technologically advanced automakers in the world. And so it is, the Lamborghini Aventador SVJ will be the last Lamborghini to carry a pure naturally aspirated V-12 engine.

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