We exist in a flux where nothing means anything, truth is debatable, nuance is dead, and despite a pervasive black-and-white mentality, everything is lost in shades of grey. What makes a good movie anymore? What makes a song a hit? What even is a luxury car when a Toyota Corolla has leather seats, powered-and-heated-everything, and can more or less drive itself? More importantly, what is the relevance of a fire-breathing supercar when an electric Hyundai can blow the doors off almost anything on the road? The Lamborghini Revuelto is a compelling reminder of why insane halo supercars still matter in an era where seemingly nothing else does.
For all intents and purposes, this is a million-dollar car. Our tester rings in at a staggering—and record-setting, for this outlet—$846,000 as-tested before any taxes and other ugly pills you’ll have to swallow to put this in your 10-car garage. There are vehicles that match or better what the Revuelto does on a spreadsheet for less than the cost of a cute bungalow that Lamborghini demands. But if that’s what you choose to fixate on, then you’ve missed the point, and you’re not who this car is for. This car means more than what can be quantified on a spec sheet.
That doesn’t mean the spec sheet isn’t eye-popping. Every number attached to the Revuelto is nuts. Where Lamborghini’s first mid-engined supercar, the Miura, was designed by a small team of young and rambunctious engineers as an after-hours skunkworks project, the Revuelto is a product of a mature, modernized Lamborghini, run by nerds and influenced from their corporate partners at Audi. Nerds who, thankfully, have the good sense to channel their powers towards being ridiculous, in true Lamborghini fashion.
Everyone I spoke to knows this as “the electric Lambo,” but it’s about so much more than that. Dismissing it as such does it (and yourself) a huge disservice. In an era where engines are increasingly being downsized and compromised to meet emissions regulations and fuel economy rules that don’t add up in reality, the Revuelto and its 814-horsepower, naturally aspirated 6.5-litre V12 is a glorious act of malicious compliance.
This is the kind of engine Jeremy Clarkson said wouldn’t be allowed to exist 20 years ago. Here it is, alive and kicking, more furious than ever and enabled in its righteous anger by the very same electric motors are allegedly neutering the industry. It’s the same new-architecture V12 from the Aventador, but with higher compression, lighter rotating mass, and screaming cam profiles that would have been completely unfeasible just a few years ago.
All engine design is a compromise; More bottom-end torque (that feels good) means less top-end power (that sells cars), and vice-versa. The trick is finding a balance that works on both sides, and Lamborghini has thrown that out the window in their rebellion. If they need to resort to hybridization to get through low-speed emissions testing anyway, why not use that to make their most over-the-top engine ever?
Knowing that a motor-generator in the dual-clutch gearbox—it’s designed in-house, not from Audi—and a pair of axial flux motors in the front wheels were going to fill in low-end grunt anyway, they decided to make the stonking V12 a howling dragon-beast that doesn’t even try to achieve the fat torque figures we expect of a modern engine. It makes “only” 534 pound-feet of torque on its own, and its peak 814 horsepower hits full song at a staggering 9,250 rpm—just a hair before a 9,400 rpm redline. It needs to idle at a grand just to stay alive. Combined output, with the engine and motors at full-tilt, is 1,001 hp and 1,044 lb-ft of torque.
Over one thousand. It wasn’t long ago that a V12 Lamborghini with half as much power shocked the world. We’ve now doubled that and we’re asking, “who cares!?” The Revuelto is melt-your-face quick. You could leave a rollercoaster for dead, and direct the ride as you see fit. The legendary Diablo was an outrage with its 4.5-second, zero-to-100 km/h sprint; this car halves that. The Revuelto is, in every sense of the world, bonkers. Exactly as we’ve come to expect from a Sant’Agata Bolognese flagship.
It’s a curious thing because there’s a diabolical Jekyll & Hyde dynamic with this car. On one hand, it’s almost docile. By default, the Revuelto starts up in its most tame Cittia mode, not even bothering to fire the signature V12 until you dictate it with the mode selector, or until it has nearly depleted its 3.8 kW battery. You can start the engine by turning it to any one of its other drive modes—Strada, Sport, and Corsa—but it’s so high-strung that it will refuse to play with you until its had a chance to warm up for a few minutes. Talk about classic Lambo diva behaviour.
The thing is, even when it’s trying to be civil, the Revuelto still oozes malcontent. It’s actually rather adept at civility, believe it or not. The engine idles smoothly, shifts are generally pretty slick, and the ride is almost nice. Electric mode feels quite natural, and the engine is capable of charging the battery in just six minutes. It manages itself very well, and you’d really have to go out of your way (via an extended breakneck track session) to deplete the battery.
So while it feels nice and is capable of stealthily slinking in and out of quiet subdivisions, the Revuelto feeds you a lot of hints that this isn’t a glorified, electrified Audi supercar. There’s a lot of gear whine, vaguely reminiscent of a racing transmission with straight-cut gears. There’s a lot of humming from the electric motors and their cooling systems. All bets are off once the engine is violently slapped to life by the motor generator, but even then, the gearbox entertains with a series of ominous clunks and thuds. Anyone who says this is a glorified Audi, an overly sterilized car, is off their rocker. Even the electric motors manage to feel pissed-off, let alone the gas beast behind you.
The way it handles is similar, almost bristling with discontent at the fact that it has to protect you from killing yourself over and over again in a thousand-horsepower car. Like any modern car, the steering isn’t exactly the last word in finesse, but it’s precise and gives you a rough idea what the 265-section Bridgestone Potenza Sport front tires are thinking. The 345s on the rear are a whole different ballgame, as they have their own steering system quietly working to make your life with this huge car less of a chore. You can constantly feel the traction control desperately juggling to shield you from your own stupidity without being a wet blanket.
I commented to one of my colleagues that the car felt “a little strange” at one point. I made a fast, sweeping right and matted the throttle, then realized after the fact that it felt strange because I matted the throttle during a corner in a thousand-horsepower car and killed myself—but the Revuelto twisted reality into another dimension where I didn’t die that day. Instead, it catapulted forward with a mechanical opera chanting about my immortality. Of course it felt strange.
We all agreed that the car perhaps felt a little too nerdy for its own good. The Revuelto’s many systems quietly try to make sure your ambition and the laws of physics never meet, leaving it in a little bit of an uncanny valley of speed, not unlike the BMW M5. The difference here is that if you have the testicular fortitude to shut it all off by holding the red, rotating mode switch to the right for a few seconds, and treat the Revuelto with some respect, it reveals itself as an exceedingly competent chassis.
When it’s constantly trying to protect you, there’s an uneasy sense, a lingering question of, “from what?” With the protection turned off, I found the answer was “actually not much,” very much like the masterpiece that was the Huracan Tecnica. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a handful; there’s a lot of kinetic energy at play, and it feels like it’s slipping all the way through the first three gears. But it’s totally manageable, and the interplay of the incredibly linear engine and the electric motors dynamically tugging on the nose is a bewitching feat of engineering that makes superhuman acts accessible for the sufficiently brave.
Of course a genius chassis is essential to all of this. Lamborghini actually abandoned the Aventador’s trick pushrod suspension for packaging reasons, in favour of adaptive coilovers and double-wishbones, and it only feels better off. The new monofuselage chassis is lighter and stiffer than before, and enables the suspension to extract the most mechanical grip possible from its colossal rolling stock. It has a slight rearward weight bias, with 56 per cent of the car’s 4,290-pound mass hanging over the rear axle, but it feels pretty well-balanced and very effectively masks its mass, refusing to understeer unless you really go out of your way to upset it. The steering is, unfortunately, almost completely numb like almost everything else. However, it’s well-calibrated and precise enough to place the nose, and the chassis offers decent feedback through your seat if you’re actually asking for it.
The colossal carbon ceramic brakes are actually among the best I’ve ever sampled. Carbon brakes usually feel pretty terrible, or at least kind of off, but that’s not the case with the Revuelto. They’re just a hair on the grabby side, but easy to adapt to and modulate. Frankly with the alarming speeds this car is capable of, I’d rather they be a little overeager to save me. The dual-clutch eight-speed transmission is pretty slick in its operation and feels better the harder you push it, deftly able to swap gears mid-corner without giving the powertrain the chance to overwhelm the chassis.
It’s a wild car that’s capable of absurd feats of fast, but almost more impressive is how docile it can be. Save for its poor electric range, the Revuelto is actually a very competent and well-calibrated EV. It bears mentioning that limited, 10-kilometre range was a deliberate decision, instead favouring the ability to be recharged on the fly quickly. It’s indeed it’s very adept at managing itself, much like the Corvette E-Ray. Even with the engine running in its mildest Strada drive mode, with the transmission left to its own devices and the adaptive damping set to soft, the steering is light, pedal responses feel organic, visibility through the front is actually quite good, and visibility out back is … greatly aided by surround-view parking cameras and blind-spot monitoring. The Revuelto is actually not a chore to drive. At all. But if you really want to be traditionalist, like me, it still lets you to open the door and sit on the sill to back up.
Outside of the raw intimidation inherent to a huge, exceptionally conspicuous car that’s hard to see out of, the Revuelto is actually quite nice to drive. There’s enough character to remind you that you’re in a real, proper Lamborghini. The sticky tires flick stones against the floor of the car. Every gear change is accompanied by a mechanical cluh-thonk that I would normally be worried about if it wasn’t a Lamborghini; ditto for the pronounced gear whine. You can hear the engine angrily heaving and huffing behind you, and it’s startling every time it starts. No warning, no starter whirring, just an abrupt crack of thunder. Every. Single. Time.
That’s the thing with this car. Despite the march of progress, despite the modernization of Lamborghini, the Revuelto goes out of its way to be an absurdist, ridiculous, theatrical experience, every single time. More than that, it’s authentic and genuine in that pursuit, not putting on an act like so many plush luxury cars with fake crackles for the kids. It’s the real deal: a classically trained, disciplined, multi-talented showman committed to the craft of capturing attention and imaginations.
It does all the Lamborghini things. It looks like a Hot Wheels car, especially in this aptly named Verde Scandal paint. It makes tons of downforce to enable unbelievable speed. It screams harder than any Lambo before it, with its manic monster of an engine unmuzzled by turbos, and makes more power still. Its electrification only enhances the driving experience with added power and poise, and is almost a middle-finger to the laws that mandated their existence. Don’t get it twisted, this is still such a Lamborghini, and the impressive engineering behind it has only helped that character.
We live in uneasy times where everything has to make sense. “Make it make sense” isn’t just a line, but a call to action. It’s why we’ve given up cars for crossovers, it’s why cinema is all the same safe-bet slop, and it’s why all top 40 songs use the same drum track and autotune. Despite having so much abundance, we’ve never felt like we’re living in more scarce times, and the Lamborghini Reveulto is a rejection of that sense, instead showing us all there’s still space for artistry, whimsy, and trying something insane just because we can.
