2018 Lamborghini Aventador Lp740-4 S Coupe! Carbon Fiber! on 2040-cars

Auto blog

Lamborghini and Bentley rack up record sales in 2022

Sister companies Lamborghini and Bentley independently announced that they set a sales record in 2022. Both firms posted a big increase in deliveries, and their announcement comes shortly after Bugatti and Rolls-Royce released their own record-breaking 2022 sales figures. Lamborghini delivered 9,233 cars in 2022, an increase of 10% over 2021 (which was a record year as well). Its best-selling model is the Urus, which accounted for 5,367 deliveries (a 7% increase over 2022). That's not surprising; SUVs sell well. What's rather stunning is that Huracan deliveries soared by 20% to 3,113 examples in 2022. Finally, Lamborghini delivered the last 753 examples of the Aventador. Geographically, the United States remains Lamborghini's biggest market; the company delivered 2,721 cars there in 2022 (an increase of 10% over 2021). China takes second place with 1,018 deliveries (up 9%) followed by Germany (808 cars; up 14%), the United Kingdom (650 cars; up by 15%), and Japan (546 cars; up 22%). All told, deliveries in the EMEA region(Europe, Middle East and Africa) jumped by 7% to 3,484 cars. The company's outlook for 2023 is bright. It will notably unveil the Aventador's hotly-anticipated successor, and the yet-unnamed model will stand out as its first series-produced hybrid model. Its historic factory in Sant'Agata Bolognese, Italy, will keep busy as well. "We now have the opportunity to focus on our next objectives also thanks to an 18-month waiting list," said company boss Stephan Winkelmann. While it's too early to tell if 2023 will be another record year for Lamborghini, executives stress that they want to keep the company's growth in check. The aim isn't to rival, say, BMW in terms of volume. "The idea will always be to have one car less than demand," Andrea Baldi, the head of the Americas region for Lamborghini, told Autoblog in 2022. "We will never become unexclusive. That is a promise." Bentley is celebrating for many of the same reasons: It sold 15,174 cars in 2022, an increase of 4% over 2021 and its first annual result above the 15,000-unit mark. Here again, there are some interesting surprises hidden in the numbers. Its best-seller was the Bentayga, it represented 42% of the firm's sales, and 2022 was the big SUV's most popular year — that's an impressive feat for a car released in 2015. The Continental GT range represented 30% of sales and the Speed variant accounted for 31% of those. The Flying Spur represented the remaining 28%.

Lamborghini Huracan blown up to create 999 NFTs

The Internet continues to hone its ability to commercialize intangibles. In this case, the situation begins with a tangible, so we'll start there. According to cryptocurrency news outlet The Block, an investor purchased a real car, a 2015 Lamborghini Huracan, for real money. Then, an artist going by the handle Shl0ms led a team of about 100 people who worked together to blow up the Italian supercoupe and turn its bits into 999 non-fungible tokens, known as NFTs, and sell the tokens at auction. The artist, the team, the explosion, and the bits are materially real — every one of them can be touched and squeezed, were one to desire. After that, well, things get digital.  This content is hosted by a third party. To view it, please update your privacy preferences. Manage Settings. Shl0ms told Fortune that his crew experimented with explosives for two weeks, looking for the right bang to bring in the most bucks. When that was decided, they took the Huracan to the desert and put a "federally licensed explosives engineer" in charge of the boom, and used high-speed cameras to capture the detonation. The collective then gathered the Lamborghini pieces, choosing 999 of them to be filmed in short 4K clips of "exquisitely filmed fragments" rotating against a black background. These videos are the non-fungible tokens going up for sale. Of those 999 video segments, 111 are reserved for the people behind the project. The remaining 888, labeled the "$CAR" group, will be listed in a 24-hour auction starting February 25, bids beginning at .01 Etherium coin (ETH) — a cryptocurrency — which is about $26 USD at current exchange rates.   So the short story is: Guy blows up Lamborghini, makes 999 videos of 999 exploded bits, sells videos online. For anyone not clear on the exclusively digital nature of the NFT, none of the winning auction bidders will get a leftover piece of Lamborghini. In answer to a tweet asking about the shards, Shl0mo tweeted that "the fragments are either large, dangerous, greasy, or all 3 and will be kept in secure storage for the foreseeable future." We know that money is one of the reasons for this endeavor. Shl0ms — who's apparently made about $1 million from "NFT art experiments" — also has precedent for this work. He destroyed a urinal akin to the one made famous in 1917 by artist Marcel Duchamp, then sold 150 NFTs of video clips of the leftover bits in 2021. That NFT collection raised $500,000.

Lamborghini Gallardo production ends on No. 14,022

The Lamborghini Gallardo made its debut at the Geneva Motor Show in 2003, after Volkswagen Group's Audi bought the Italian automaker. With a V10 engine, all-wheel drive and relatively high production numbers for a Lamborghini (about 2,000 per year), it easily became the the company's best-selling car. Ten years later, Gallardo production has ended to make room for a new super sportscar that has been seen testing and is widely referred to as the Cabrera (Lamborghini hasn't officially said what it will be called).
The last Gallardo to roll off the assembly line was a LP 570-4 Spyder Performante in Rosso Mars (Mars Red). It's No. 14,022 and will be going to a private collector. In the first four decades of Lamborghini's existence, before the Gallardo was released the year of the company's 40th anniversary, the automaker built an average of 250 cars per year. Do the math and you'll realize that almost half of the roughly 30,000 Lamborghinis built since 1963 are Gallardos.
The Gallardo was continually improved over the years, resulting in ever higher horsepower, direct-injected engines, rear-wheel-drive models and the open-top Spyder, such as the Gallardo LP 550-2 Spyder we tested in 2012.