2012 Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder on 2040-cars

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Lamborghini goes from carbon fiber to carbon neutral [w/video]

Draw up a list in your mind of automakers striving to "save the environment," and you might be forgiven for not ranking Lamborghini very high on impressions alone. After all, it only makes supercars with double-digit cylinder counts, displacing over 5.0 liters, and producing in excess of 600 horsepower. Hardly what you'd characterize as "green" modes of transportation, then. And though it recently showed a hybrid sports car concept, it has opted next to build an SUV instead. However the Raging Bull marque is out to rehabilitate its image by changing the reality of its carbon footprint. It's just not about to do so by watering down the supercars for which it is known. "We are not here to please a single customer. We are here to pass this territory unharmed to the next generation." – Lamborghini CEO, Stephan Winkelmann This week the Italian automaker officially opened its new Trigeneration Plant – which is not, lest you think otherwise, an assembly facility spanning multiple eras of production. It's a new power plant, built on the site of the company's headquarters in Sant'Agata Bolognese, that will generate its electricity, heating, and cooling, all from the same source of natural gas. The plant has an installed (potential) capacity of 1.2 megawatts, and will (practically speaking) be capable of generating over 25,000 MWh every year. That'd be enough to power all the houses in Sant'Agata, the otherwise sleepy town which Lamborghini shares with about 7,000 residents. The clean-burning facility is estimated to cut out 820 tons of CO2 every year, and by 2017 is slated to run on biofuel to raise that figure to a claimed 5,600 tons per year. The question is, who cares? Sure, people buying EVs and free-range chickens want to be assured that their buying habits fit their environmental conscience, but does the average Lamborghini buyer really care if their new supercar came from an environmentally friendly factory? "If we are going to do the things only because of the importance first thing for the customer, we would not be here anymore," Lamborghini CEO Stephan Winkelmann told us during roundtable discussion at the opening of the Trigeneration Plant. "We are not here to please a single customer. We are here to pass this territory unharmed to the next generation." "It would be ridiculous if you would say we are going to save the world.

Lamborghini Urus SUV to be assembled in Slovakia

Lamborghini is known for many, many things. Beautiful, exotic and expressive styling, extreme performance and eye-watering prices are Lambo hallmarks. But the Raging Bull is perhaps best known for building its cars by hand... in Slovakia?
No, it's known for building its cars in Italy. But with the Urus SUV, which is already a departure (although not an unprecedented one) from your traditional Lamborghini, the brand could move construction outside the boot-shaped country, and east, into the former Soviet state.
The move will see the Urus, which will ride on a modified version of the Volkswagen Group's MLB platform, screwed together alongside the VW Touareg, Audi Q7, Porsche Cayenne and Bentley's eventual SUV at VAG's Bratislava factory. In terms of consolidating production in one factory, it's clearly a clever move. Still, we wonder if setting up Urus production outside of the Sant'Agata factory and in the sprawling Bratislava facility won't lessen the specialness inherent in Lamborghini products.

Infographic: Comparing the Veneno, LaFerrari and P1 supercars

This year's Geneva Motor Show served as the launch platform for three of the world's latest and greatest supercars. The Italians brought us the Lamborghini Veneno and the Ferrari LaFerrari, while the British unveiled the production version of the McLaren P1.
To put the three in better perspective - as if any of us will ever fully comprehend trio of million dollar coupes - the Aussies at Motoring.com built an infographic (click above to enlarge) that outlines what makes each of these cars so spectacular. Using unique colors to represent each of the vehicles, the team put together a variety of charts that focus on vital statistics, pricing, total production run and other parameters all designed to ease the process of digesting an overabundance of exotic goodness. We have uploaded the graphic full size in this link.