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Wild one-off Lamborghini Sogna for sale at $3M [w/videos]

The Lamborghini Countach was the dream car for many teens and pre-teens in the 1980s, but at least one Japanese man thought there was room for improvement. As the story goes, Ryoji Yamazaki had a dream of a supercar as a 13-year-old, and at the age of 41, he used his design studio, Art & Tech, to create the Sogna in 1991.
Yamazaki unveiled the Sogna at the 1991 Geneva Motor Show as a rebodied Countach with intentions of selling it in limited production, but thankfully - or sadly, depending how you look at it - the $1.6 million (1991 price) coachbuilt supercar never made it into production. The Geneva show car was a rolling chassis, and the only other example that was produced was a fully operational version, shown above, which was unveiled at the 1994 Essen Motor Show. This car from Essen is now listed for sale on James Edition for 2.38 million euros, or around $3.25 million USD.
With its oddball styling and kiwi green paint, the Sogna was likely doomed from the start, but it still boasts the Countach's full powertrain including the 448-horsepower, 5.2-liter V12 and a claimed top speed of 186 miles per hour. Check out more images of the 1994 Sogna at James Edition and Enmann, and we also found a couple videos, which are posted below, of the car's early development.

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.

Another Lamborghini Veneno for sale, this time for only $8m

There are some cars you expect to see coming up for sale often in the used car listings. Civics, RAV4s, F-150s... you know, the kind of car that they build by the thousand, build to sell, and build to last. More attention-grabbing for us, though, is when we see multiples of a rarer model coming up time and again in the same place. Like the Lamborghini Veneno, for example. The factory in Sant'Agata only made three of these coupes for public consumption, and each of them sold for about $4 million. So we were surprised when we saw one pop up on Mobile.de with a whopping $11 million price tag. But we were even more surprised to see another one for sale on the same site, just weeks later. Pictured with red details (instead of white like the last one), this example is listed as the first of the three made, with only 100 kilometers (62 miles) on the odometer. Its owner is asking ˆ7.1 million – equivalent to nearly $8 million at current exchange rates. That's about twice what Lamborghini charged in the first place, four times what it charged more recently for the new Centenario, and twenty times the price of the Aventador on which they're all based. But it's still a heck of a lot less than the $11 million asked for the last one. Of course, the seller can ask for however much he or she wants, but actually getting that price is quite another matter. Part of us gets the feeling that if someone were really that interested, the listings wouldn't still be up for weeks now. The other part is surprised some squillionaire somewhere in the world hasn't ponied up an even $20 million to take both home already. Related Video: