I Test Drove Lamborghini's $600,000 Car—Here's What I Thought of Their Most Powerful Vehicle Ever
Photo: Courtesy of Lamborghini
The color of the all-new, $600,000 Lamborghini Revuelto that I recently drove through the Shawangunk Valley in upstate New York is called Verde Scandalo. That sordid moniker is fitting to the car’s hue, which, slathered on the chunkily flattened two-seat trapezoid, is as lurid and attention-grabbing in the region’s shabby Catskills bungalow towns as a rolling two-ton wedge of phosphorescent gouda. Scandalous also describes the car’s sound. The bombast issuing from Lamborghini Revuelto’s 6.5-liter V-12 engine literally stuns everything that it passes—turkeys teaching their poults to scratch for grubs, construction workers expressing steaming ribbons of asphalt, picnicking hipsters escaped from Mohonk—like a chartreuse freeze ray issuing from a comic book villain’s gun.
This is intentional. In fact, it is the intent of nearly every Lamborghini ever made. The brand is, in essence, a spectacular presence, shocking everything it passes with the sonic boom of its trinity: profligacy, potency, and perturbation. This experience does not stop when one ceases driving. Open the scissor door and its far edge rotates out and up vertically, like an obscene gesture to the world. This is exactly the experience owners desire from a Lamborghini. If a Rolls-Royce pegs you as an arriviste, an Aston Martin as a debonair wannabe, and a Bugatti as someone who just sold their medical tech company, a Lambo tattoos you not necessarily as a disruptor, but as disruptive.
As someone who test drives high-end sport and luxury cars for a living and who believes deeply that All Cars Are Drag—costumes one puts on and takes off to undermine or befoul convention—this is part of the appeal. Driving a Lamborghini allows one to experience, and delight in, novel forms of human loathing, ones tinged with exhilaration, avarice, and revulsion—the latter of which may be, but isn’t, the English translation of revuelto. (It actually means scrambled or turbulent.)
In case you were wondering, the Revuelto is fast. Though it weighs a quarter ton more than its predecessor, the molar-cracking Aventador, the new gas engine and a trio of electric motors—one helping to spin the rear wheels, the other pair motivating the fronts—provide a total output of 1,001 hp. This not only makes it the most powerful production Lamborghini ever, it gives it the grunt to rip from a standstill to 60 mph in under 2.5 seconds, on the way to an impossible top speed of 217 mph.
Even the windshield wiper is fast, something I had the unfortunate opportunity to discover while piloting this neon missile around southern Ulster County. The roads were damp with recent and ongoing rain, so I mostly forewent any real stunting. But when the weather and traffic cleared that afternoon, I managed to prod the car a little and found it radically and compellingly quick. Also oddly composed, not a feature typically associated with range-topping 12-cylinder raging bulls. It was able to howl at the top of its wild 9,250 rpm redline and snap off instantaneous shifts from its steering column-mounted transmission paddles, but without the chiropractic excess of many of its forebears.
Can a Lamborghini be civilized? Should it? When the handling is this sticky, the cabin is this comfortable, and the relationship between accelerator, steering wheel, and driver this point-and-squirt, I’m not opposed.
I credit the car’s supplemental electrics for some of this oozy smoothness. The instant-on nature of battery power fills in endemic gaps in the controlled explosions of internal combustion, in much the way that fillers settle the consternation in many Lamborghini-owners’ faces. It even allows the option of driving six miles on electric power alone, a feat I accomplished toward the end of my wheel time. Though I’d scared myself a few times during the damp day—flirting with hairpinned grip limits, blasting at triple digits through empty valleys, emerging from the car to use a local gas station restroom—this may have been the eeriest experience of all. It provided a koan of sorts: What is the meaning of a silent Lamborghini? The first pure-electric one is slated to arrive next year, so we’ll reserve full judgment until then.
Like those smartphone users who insist on holding all public conversations on speaker, the noise in the Revuelto can be switched back on, in volumes that range from blaring to alienating, via various steering wheel mounted toggles. Does this dualistic Jeckyl-and-Hyde’ing make this supercar worth its extortionate price? Silence, as they say, is golden, and gold is, as of this writing, trading at $2,433 per ounce. Meaning 4,000 pounds of it would be $155.65 million. A bargain, by that metric. But as the reign of gasoline-powered cars approaches its apotheosis, the noise—visceral, percussive, and still analog—is precisely what Lamborghinisti are paying for. And if headquarters in Sant’agata thinks they can extract a minimum of $600,000 for the privilege, they’re probably right.
Originally Appeared on Architectural Digest
