Lamborghini's Obsession With Tech Is Paying Off
The Revuelto is chock full of motors, but it's the algorithms that make it a mighty thing.
As much as I loved the outgoing Aventador, it wasn't what any reasonable person would call a "good" car. Awkward to climb into, stuck with a reluctant transmission as archaic and unpleasant as was its infotainment system, the Aventador's list of faults were long enough make anyone struggle to write them off as "charm."
Put simply: When its V12 wasn't thrilling you, the rest of the experience was trying your patience.
But what a thrill. Don't get me wrong, I loved the thing, and a quick Googling will probably find some piece of mine or another where I waxed about Lambo's biggest brute. (Assuming, at least, that CNET hasn't yet deleted them all.) But, now that the Aventador’s replacement is here, it's all the more apparent just how badly that bad bull needed to be put out to pasture.
The new bull is the 1,001 hp Revuelto, and if you want to read me gushing about this one, you can find my impressions over at Slashgear. Or, if you're more into films, over at Engadget, you can watch me hit 170 mph while blathering on about torque vectoring.
I hope you'll keep on reading here, though, because I have a bit more to say about that topic.
The Revuelto has so much fascinating tech going on that I couldn't fit it all into either of those pieces above. I had a fascinating chat with Lamborghini CTO Rouven Mohr, who blew my mind with all the tricks that car pulls to hide the roughly 500 pounds it's gained over the Aventador.
Yes, the Aventador, an already porky machine, is two fullbacks lighter than the new Revuelto. And yet, you'd absolutely never know it from behind the wheel.
That weight comes courtesy of the Revuelto's plug-in hybrid system. Despite the dinky, 3.8-kWh battery pack, a trio of electric motors (two at the front, one at the rear) and inverters add all that weight to the new car. All that delivers power, of course, mating with and accompanying the 6.5-liter V12 to give a whopping 1,001 horsepower to the driver.
But to me, all that force pales compared to everything the Revelto's systems can do. Take its traction control, for example. When your average car detects wheelspin, it either cuts throttle or spark to drop the engine's output. The Revuelto, instead, just ramps up the regen on that third motor, a radial unit mounted directly on the V12.
The tangible result is the same: Less power going to the wheels so you're less likely to spin into a ditch. However, instead of that torque going to waste, it's captured, swapped for electrons via the electric motor, and shoved into the battery, all the better to pull you out of the next corner.
And when it's time to do that, having two axial flux motors up front means the car can pull the nose around and keep you on your desired line even when you're asking far too much of the 20- or 21-inch Bridgestone Potenza Sport tires up front.
The volume of software driving those disparate hardware systems has dramatically increased the onboard processing required. I asked CTO Rouven Mohr about how all the car is handling all that data:
"We have three different inverters because we have three different e-motors. So, you increase, a lot, the traffic on the bus systems and therefore, for sure, this kind of information flow, you have to manage in a very proper way," Mohr told me, saying that managing all that data is a huge challenge. The bus is the central data pipeline for the car, which previously was fragmented and extremely bandwidth-limited. Now, thanks in part to high-bandwidth technologies like in-car Ethernet, that pipeline is opening up.
Still, it's in high demand: "This is the biggest challenge that you have to solve from the technical point of view, because it's not so much so much anymore only that we architecture that you have to manage, packaging," he continued. "It's more about the electronic architecture. And, very important, not only the number of control units, also the energy flow of the control units, how you allocate the functions on how many different control units. This is the biggest challenge."
All that additional processing power enables the car's various onboard systems to chat much more quickly and thus adjust the car more quickly, too, even before it happens. "We are not waiting what is the reaction of the car," Mohr told me, "we have a forecast algorithm."
This is all the result of Lamborghini being unusually progressive with new technology. While the scope of this tech is broader on Revuelto than we've ever seen before, it isn't exactly new. Lamborghini has been on the bleeding edge of composite research for years now, and even the ol' Aventador had a few tricks that are still cutting edge. Instead of a boring lead-acid 12-volt battery it had a supercapacitor. Why? Ostensibly to save mass, but surely the reason was as much to do with marketing. Regardless, the advancements in the Revuelto are anything but press release fodder.
Okay, it's not perfect. Lamborghini putting the charging port inside the frunk shows that the company really doesn't care whether its owners ever actually charge the thing. And the new infotainment system, though interesting, still felt a smidge too sluggish for my tastes.
Otherwise, the Revuelto is a remarkable machine. While many other storied manufacturers are being dragged kicking and screaming into an electrified future, Lamborghini seems to be having fun with the future potential. And, when it comes to Lamborghinis, fun is what it's all about.