Back in 2023, Italian supercar maker Lamborghini announced it was going to enter into the electric age in style by bringing to life the Lanzador, a 1,341-horsepower “Ultra GT” that would be the most powerful car the brand had ever made by some considerable margin.
That dream, Lamborghini confirmed yesterday, has been shelved. Mirroring similar retreats from electrification made by other high-end automakers recently, the company announced the car will no longer be put into production.
Speaking to WIRED, the carmaker’s chief executive, Stephan Winkelmann, says that after a year of talking to dealers and looking at market and customer data, “it was clear not only that the acceptance of full electric cars is flattening worldwide for our type of cars, it's going almost to zero—if not to zero.”
Winkelmann says that although Lamborghini is ready for electric car manufacturing, “the [high-end] market is not.” As a result, Winkelmann says that the brand decided “in the last few weeks or days” that its first model in the next era for Lamborghini powertrains will be not full EV but a plug-in hybrid.
“So by the end of this decade, all four [Lamborghinis] are going to be hybrids, and not, as we said, two of them electric,” Winkelmann says, confirming that this new hybrid will arrive in 2029.
To outline the significance and expense of such a U-turn from the carmaker, the Lamborghini Lanzador was not merely a static concept car but a full working vehicle with a finalized interior and exterior design, capable of driving on public roads. Indeed, WIRED was one of the very few media outlets to get a drive in the electric car with its “spaceship-inspired nose” in September 2023, though the company did underline at the time the drivetrain was not representative of the final production model, which was due to arrive in 2028.
The full electric Lamborghini Lanzador was set to come out in 2028, but has now been canceled in favor of a plug-in hybrid model coming in 2029. Photograph: Lamborghini
This move from Lamborghini underlines the parlous state of luxury EVs at present, a trend WIRED has charted. Bentley announced in late 2024 that it's pushing its electric plans back five years to 2035, blaming poor EV demand and weak charging infrastructure. Aston Martin has pushed back the launch of its first all-electric car, now aiming for late in the decade. The Genesis G80 has been discontinued in the US. Despite the imminent launch of the electric Cayenne, Porsche, faced with plummeting operating profits, has taken a huge financial hit to dramatically scale back its electrification efforts.