The Lamborghini Urus will be the first ever Super SUV

From the teaser images and videos so far released to whet our appetites, the new Urus couldn’t be more different from the angular, V12-powered LM002 of 1986. It won’t look like it and it certainly won’t go like it, living up to its super-SUV billing with figures to raise eyebrows even among today’s mega SUVs: well over 600bhp, top speed approaching 190mph, 0-62mph in not much over three seconds.

There’s no V12 expected here, though, instead a blown V8 – making this the first-ever turbocharged Lamborghini. But it will recall its ancestor by being the first Lambo since the LM002 to offer more than just two doors and two seats, and with standard all-wheel drive is expected to have a degree of ability off-road. More anyway than an Aventador…

Plus we can expect most, if not quite all, of the design drama of Lamborghini’s sports cars. The latest teaser video shows the best clues yet to what it will look like. 

Arrival of the Urus as the first super-sports utility vehicle, as opposed to merely a massively powerful luxury SUV, is a significant moment, giving Lamborghini as it does a year or more’s head start over rivals from Aston Martin and Ferrari (and possibly Lotus too but definitely not, we are told, McLaren).

Every sports/luxury company that has added an SUV interloper to its range has seen it become its biggest-selling model, often by a huge margin, and Lamborghini is sure to follow suit. Around 300 LM002s were made between 1986 and 1993 and the Urus will be out to put a nought on the end of that – every year. It will outsell the sports cars while at the same time guaranteeing their future. Future total Lambo production is scheduled to hit 7000 a year, double what it is now.

The assembly facilities in Sant-Agata Bolognese have doubled in size to accommodate the new model. As well as a dedicated new Urus assembly line there’s a whole new multi-surface track on which to test it.

Make no mistake all this comes together to make a huge moment in the endlessly fascinating career of what to many is the world’s most charismatic supercar manufacturer. No surprise then that Lambo is hyping the launch for all it’s worth, using the tagline “Since we made it possible” and claiming the LM002 as the world’s first luxury SUV.

Born out of the Cheetah concept and military LM001, the front-engined V12 LM002 found a market of sorts in the Middle East but it is only with a lot of SUV hindsight that the model is significant; at the time “Rambo Lambo” was derided. Then again anything linked to the Miura and powered by the Countach’s V12 had to have something going for it.

We suspect the new Urus won’t sound quite so good, but will probably go round corners better!