Going off the beaten track: the Lamborghini designed to be driven on dirt

As it stares down an all-electric future, Lamborghini has gone off the beaten track with its off-road supercar V10 Huracan Sterrato.

The future is looking bright for Lamborghini, with hybrids, EVs and off-roading supercars?

Lamborghini, the world’s loudest and wildest super car company, knows the end is nigh for its big, thirsty engines – it will launch its first fully electric vehicle in 2028 – but it has decided to go out with a bang, and quite likely a crash, by launching a version of its vicious V10 Huracan super car designed to be driven on dirt.

The Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato (it means “unpaved” in Italian) will be “a whole new kind of car, something no other brand has attempted before”, according to the regional director for Asia Pacific, Francesco Scardaoni.

You could argue that there are very good reasons no one has ever thought to take a V10-powered super car with enough power to send it sideways even on sealed roads and built an off-road-ready version of it. That, undeniably, insanely, is what Lamborghini plans to do with the Sterrato, however, which will be launched later this year and will become the final version of the Huracan, which was first unveiled in 2014.

“It will be an interesting segment to explore,” Scardaoni said of the previously non-existent gap in the market that will be filled by a Huracan with a higher ride height, flared wheel arches and off-road cladding.

“We have had expressions of interest in this car worldwide, including from Australia, and we have letters of intent from people here, people who are placing deposits with our dealers to get one of these cars.”

The final variant of the hugely entertaining Huracan will also be the last gasp for Lamborghini’s purely internal-combustion-engined vehicle range.

The Huracan Sterrato is equipped with a V10 engine, can certainly handle going bush

Next year, the company will launch its first hybrid – albeit a car entirely unlike what you might picture when that term comes to mind.

The replacement for the Lamborghini Aventador, its bat-winged pinnacle and the descendant of the legendary Countach, will have a naturally aspirated V12 engine, connected to a plug-in hybrid system with batteries and at least two electric motors.

The name and specification of this new car is still top secret, but Scardaoni says it is a vital vehicle for the brand and its customers.

“We always said we didn’t wan to be first when it came to electrification, but the time has come – our customers are asking for EVs, we have a new generation of customer who want new products that are sustainable, eco friendly, so we will design pure EV cars for them, with the first one, a four-seater, to come in 2028,” he explained, sighing only slightly.

“The Aventador is the masterpiece of our product line, so we wanted to start with that, our flagship V12, and many of our customers want to keep that engine alive, so it will continue, but as a plug-in hybrid. This is our bridge to the electrified future and the reason to start with that is to keep the sound of our engines alive.

“Then, by 2025, after the plug-in replacement for the Huracan arrives, our range will be fully hybridised, and we will see a 50 per cent reduction in our CO2 emissions.”

The Huracan Sterrato will leave you in the dust, literally.

Much like its distantly related cousin company Porsche – both are part of the giant Volkswagen Group – Lamborghini is holding out hope that synthetic fuels, or bio fuels, will allow it to continue making its deafening internal-combustion engines in limited numbers for many years yet, but if that fails, its glorious Italian operatic machines will fall silent, to be replaced by the kind of fake, synthetic sounds found in other sporty electric vehicles.

Looking slightly sick at the thought, Scardaoni says those sounds are something the company is already working hard on.

“As of today, a large part of the DNA of Lamborghini is the sound, the V10 and the V12, that roar but in the new electrification era, we will have a different kind of sound,” he said. “We are still designing this, still understanding what our customers want.”

Those customers who buy a Lamborghini Huracan Sterrato, drive it on dirt and don’t end up upside down in a ditch, or at the top of a tree on fire, have an entirely different future to look forward to.