Farewell, Performante: Urus SE will soon be the only Lamborghini SUV available

TopGear.com recently caught up with Lamborghini CTO Rouven Mohr to discuss the thinking behind the hybrid Urus SE, and why Lambo isn’t in a hurry to go fully electric.

Does Urus SE's need to be a comfortable daily driver get in the way of engineering for more performance?

Yes, to be honest. It’s important to understand this car is replacing the Urus S and Performante, so in the future you can only order this, the Urus SE.

This car is an all-rounder and it’s even more comfortable [than the Urus S] because we’ve done a complete recalibration of the air suspension. If you put the SE on the same tyre, it’s faster than the Urus Performante, its track times are close to the Performante and it’s more fun because we can run much more rear wheel drive.

But like you said at the beginning, the development target was for the car to have a wider bandwidth of driving characteristics.

What were some of the targets for electrifying the Urus?

For us, it’s not [about] the overall performance figures. If you look at the numbers, the power and the torque of the electric motor and combustion engine, you will recognise that the sum of that system power is not the sum of both. Our focus is to shape the driving experience.

So to improve drivability, the activeness was more important than absolute peak power output. In the end, you’re not feeling peak power, you’re feeling how the car behaves. If you go on the throttle, off the throttle, during shifting, we optimise the load.

In the Revuelto, the goal of the hybrid was to keep performance consistent throughout track sessions. Was the intention the same here?

Yes, exactly. The Revuelto is even more [track focused] than this car, but we have clear targets based on our internal requirements. There should be no thermal derating, no depleting of the battery. The performance has to be consistent so if you drive the same corner 233 times the perception of the behaviour of the car has to be the same.

There are hybrids on the market - I won’t name names - where the hybrid system completely changes the performance strategy. They have an additional e-motor with two gears, and depending on which gear is engaged, you have different acceleration behaviour.

You then have a kind of hysteresis and these kind of things, we don’t want. We want to have a predictable, natural and consistent behaviour that’s also understandable for the driver.

With the Revuelto, you chose to retain the V12 from the Aventador and support it with a hybrid system rather than downsizing. Did you decide to keep the twin-turbo V8 in the Urus for similar reasons?

Exactly. Our philosophy on hybridisation is quite simple and clear. We add the electric components to add more performance and add more to the driving experience. We don't want to downsize. We want to have an additional value for the customer based on the electric components. Therefore for us it was clear: V8, we don't want to reduce it.

Couldn’t the same have been done with the V10 that ended its production with the Huracán, which is going to be replaced with a downsized unit?

It’s not always about the cylinder numbers. You should measure it on the power output of the combustion engine. We don’t want to come to a situation where we have a certain ratio between combustion power and electric power.

Our performance-oriented hybrids are all recognised by the absolute dominant combustion part, and then we add the electric part to support, to make the combustion part more powerful, more reactive.

What’s the most challenging aspect of developing a fully electric Lamborghini?

The biggest challenge is not so much about performance because that’s always our baseline. The reason to buy a Lambo is the design, but also especially the driving emotions.

And it’s clear that for full electric, we have to find the right interpretation that is fitting to our level of driving emotions, because this is what people are expecting from our brand.