The Aventador is Lamborghini's fastest car ever. Here's everything you need to know about it.
Make no mistake about it., the Aventador is a frothing mad supercar that doesn’t merely fill the shoes of the outgoing Murcielago, it’s by most measures a quantum leap for Lamborghini. It’s absolutely packed with technology that has never been seen in a car at this price point, much less any Lamborghini before it.
The engine, chassis and transmission are all entirely new and all are engineered with maximum performance in mind. Lamborghini has gotten serious saving weight with the Aventador. The technology found in the chassis, and previewed in the Sesto Elemento concept, has up to this point, been the exclusive domain of hypercars costing nearly triple what the Aventador will cost when it goes on sale later this year.
The passenger cell is a single piece carbon fiber structure constructed with assistance from Boeing Aerospace.This unit alone weighs a mere 324 lbs and with the aluminum crash structures attached, a little over 500 lbs. The chassis also features inboard mounted springs and dampers to keep unsprung weight at minimum. This is a feature that not even the likes of Bugatti and Pagani can claim to have
The Bizzarrini V12 was an engine that served Lamborghini well. It powered every V12 Lamborghini since the Miura, but it reached the end of its life with the Murcielago LP 670-4 SV. The new direct injection V12 was designed from the ground up specifically for use in this car. It’s a 6.5 liter normally aspirated unit that puts out 690 bhp and revs to a soaring 8,250 rpm. It’s also dry sumped which means it’s not only lighter than the outgoing V12, but crucially it can also be mounted 2.8 inches lower in the chassis. It’s mpg figure of 13.7 is impressive for an engine of this type, but one that will in all likelihood be of little consequence to future owners.
Again in the name of weight savings, Lamborghini elected not to use a dual clutch transmission. The seven speed single clutch unit takes a page from F1 gearboxes and is able to “slip” from gear to gear. Shifts only take 50 milliseconds, which is more than on par with the current generation of dual clutch ‘boxes.
The payoff for all this attention to weight savings and efficiency results in some pretty astonishing performance. The power to weight ratio sits at a little over five pounds per horsepower, whereas the Murcielago’s was a little under six pounds per horsepower. Zero to sixty comes in a cracking 2.9 seconds and top speed is 217 mph.
Styling is a sort of amalgam of recent Lamborghini one-offs and concepts including the Reventon, Estoque and Sesto Elemento. Several professional internet commenters have accused the Aventador of being too derivative in the styling department, but to these eyes, it manages to be striking without being overly outrageous, at least by Lamborghini standards!
At $370,000 / £230,000, the Aventador certainly won’t be cheap, but when you take into consideration the level of technology that has gone into making it and the performance you get out of it, it starts to seem like a bargain. The Aventador should be a legend in the making.
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