Lamborghini has recommitted to the local market, announcing a new distribution partnership with Toby Venter, better known as South Africa’s ‘Mr Porsche.’ A static reveal of the new Urus SUV accompanied the announcement, made at Lamborghini’s new Cape Town dealership, to illustrate how serious the company was about its future business prospects in South Africa.
Venter’s LSM distributors are best known for their success in sustaining and growing Porsche’s presence in Mzansi, but of late the company has gained the responsibility for Bentley’s South African operations and now, Lamborghini’s too.
Noting our voracious appetite for purebred high-performance automobiles, Lamborghini has identified South Africa as one of it key future markets and feels that the brand’s product portfolio is finally correct for local conditions. That is of course a euphemistic allusion to the introduction of Urus.
The first of Lamborghini’s SUVs should arrive with pre-ordered customers next week, in Europe, and locally within the 12 months. With its greater passenger and luggage capacity, not to mention the ability to perform on terrain never considered by Huracan and Aventador owners, Urus opens the Lamborghini brand to a range of new customers.
Keen to more than double global sales by the end of next year, Lamborghini realises that Urus can conquer markets which simply were not possible with its traditional mid-engined supercars. Although the platform is a shared VW Group large SUV structure, Lamborghini’s engineers have spent inordinate amounts of R&D time and technical resources to imbue Urus with distinctive driving characteristics.
The turbocharged V8 engine, good for 478kW, operates through adaptable drive modes, with software many times more aggressive than any Q7, Cayenne or Touareg. Although turbocharged, the 4-litre V8 redlines at 6750rpm, which certainly helps the claim of Urus being a distinctively Lamborghini interpretation of what an SUV should be.
Performance is radical and the styling as geometric as ever. With a top speed of 305kph and 0-100kph credentials of 3.6 seconds, it’s as statistically relevant as any Lamborghini could hope to be. Those numbers are even more incredible when you consider that a Urus weighs all of 2200kg.
With a new showroom in Cape Town and commitment to double the brand’s sales volumes in South Africa, expect more raging bulls to be running in the far-right hand lane on a Sunday morning in and around South Africa’s major cities.
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