Lamborghini’s chief technical officer Rouven Mohr has described its new V12 plug-in hybrid Revuelto flagship as offering the most visceral, dynamic driving experience ever from the brand.
“One of the development targets for Revuelto was to have a very authentic, natural and linear driving behaviour, even if you exploit the limits of the car,” said Mr Mohr.
“All the technology that’s behind the scenes; the torque vectoring, the torque distribution from front to rear, rear-wheel steer – everything, shouldn’t be recognised by the driver – otherwise it’s not well done.
“The driver has to feel what the car is doing – whether the car is neutral, or the car is oversteering or understeering, it has to be consistent. We also want the driver to be able to play with the car in Sport mode, even down to drifting.
“For us at Lamborghini, it’s absolutely mandatory to have the control strategy that allows the driver to have this predictability in the car. We also have very high mechanical grip on the Revuelto with huge tyres – up to 355s at the rear, so you have to be able to sense the reactions of the car in any situation.
Mr Mohr firmly believes there has never been anything like the Revuelto to the degree which has been achieved, at least from a dynamic standpoint with a car in this category.
“I can assure you, you’ve never driven a car in this mid-engine category with this much power and this level of mechanical grip, or that is so confident. Even after just a few laps you feel confident enough to start playing with the car,” he said.
Mr Mohr agrees that with the Aventador, which the Revuelto replaces, you really had to be an expert with the car, but with the level of technology development over the last decade or so with software, it has changed the parameters dramatically.
“The things you can do with the dynamic control systems is so impressive, it just puts it in another dimension altogether. It borders on magic, even,” he said.
“It’s not perfection because that would be boring, so we had to make sure the car still had lots of character – not just with sound but also from the car’s reactions.
“The biggest challenge was to dial in a natural feeling into the car – especially when you consider the overall complexity of the drivetrain; three motors, a double-clutch gearbox mounted transversely, torque vectoring on the front as well, rear-wheel steering and active dampers – you have to set all this up in such a way that the driver doesn’t recognise any of the magic when it all comes together.
“There are a lot of parameters in which you can intervene and this seamlessness has to be there no matter what the level of charge in the battery. It’s a very complex challenge.”
Mr Mohr told CarExpert the sound of the engine was an interesting area of development and something they had to get right given the Aventador’s trademark scream.
“For sure everyone was already in love with the old V12 sound, but we found if you go build to higher revs the crescendo of the engine can be improved with a sharper sound, so now it will rev out to 9500rpm,” he said.
“We also employed a lot of counter-measures on this car. First of all we only chose a battery as large as we required from a performance perspective, because with Revuelto we’re not after range.
“We wanted weight-saving measures; the engine is lighter and we have the lightest gearbox mounted transversely for this situation – and we avoid buffer. On top of that we have rear-wheel steering and rear torque vectoring, as well as a pure EV range of between 10 and 15km”, concluded Mr Mohr.
The Revuelto is still being fine-tuned in preparation for its global dynamic launch later in the year.
Dubbed the first super sports V12 Hybrid HPEV (High Performance Electrified Vehicle), the Revuelto is a technological tour de force boasting a 6.5-litre naturally aspirated V12 engine, paired with an eight-speed transverse gearbox and three electric motors.
Total system output is 1015 CV (747kW).
Going from standstill to 100km/h takes just 2.5 seconds, while 200km/h comes up in less than seven seconds. Top speed is claimed at more than 350km/h.
