The curtain is coming down on pure V12 engines, but Lamborghini’s big boy has one more bow to take before it’s all over
The Lamborghini Aventador is on its way out after 11 years, but before its electrified replacement arrives there is one last sting in the eardrum – the Lamborghini LP780-4 Aventador Ultimae. There is a bit more power, some laser-cut printed seat cut-outs and a badge that tells you it’s either one of 250 Roadsters of 350 Coupes. It remains as flawed as the Aventador has always been, for the same reasons, but it is still long on charm.
Price and Equipment
The Lamborghini Aventador is a known quantity now, or it ought to be, because it has spawned a bewildering number of limited-editions and special body styles, including the 2022 Lamborghini LP780-4 Aventador Ultimae we’re testing here.
The Ultimae is the last in a surprisingly long line of Aventador and Aventador-based special-editions. It all started with the LP700-4 back in 2011, followed by the Roadster in 2013.
They both ran until the Aventador 740-4 S took over in 2016 (with the Roadster arriving a year later), though the Aventador LP-750-4 Superveloce was cranked out from 2015 to 2017, and the Roadster backed it up, fairly ridiculous roof and all.
The track-attack Lamborghini SVJ landed in 2018 (the Roadster began in 2019), and now there’s the Ultimae.
But that’s not all.
There were short-lived versions, like the Aventador J in 2012, the Avendator Dreamliner Edition (2013), the 720-4 50th Anniversary Edition in 2013, the Pirelli Edition in 2014, the Miura Homage in 2016, the SVJ ’63 (2019), the SVJ XAGO in 2020, and the Essenza SCV12 track special in 2020.
And then there were the rebodied Aventadors, like the Vaneno in 2013, the Centenario in 2016, the SC18 Alston from 2018, the Sian FKP37 in 2019, the SC20 in 2020 and, finally, the controversial Countach LP1 800-4 last year.
Lamborghini notched up production of 10,000 Aventadors in September 2020.
So what’s different and what’s new with the Ultimae? The core is unchanged, with a thumping great 6.5-litre V12 engine sitting behind the driver’s ears, a seven-speed transmission that nobody likes and all-wheel drive, all connected to a rigid carbon-fibre chassis.
To the usual tricks, it adds a self-locking rear diff, continues with the Haldex MkIV centre differential and uses rear-wheel steering as well.
Lamborghini will only make 250 LP780-4 Aventador Ultimae Roadsters and 350 Coupes, and each of them will wear its own plate, and there are some trim details that also separate them from lesser Aventador S models.
Lamborghini claims its new front splitter gives it front downforce similar to the hard-core SVJ, helping with the light feel of the front-end at speed.
The SVJ tops Lamborghini Australia’s current line-up at $949,640 plus on-road costs, so given its potential resale value you could say the Ultimae is an absolute snip at $904,419 plus ORCs for the Coupe and $992,653 for the Roadster.
Safety and Technology
But what’s really new? Nobody wants to talk about safety, trim and paint when there’s 780 horsepower of V12 to play with, but that’s what’s most unique about the 2022 Lamborghini LP780-4 Aventador Ultimae.
The new paint codes include two-tones and tone-on-tone designs, with 18 standard colours and more than 300 more on offer at Ad Personam, Lamborghini’s in-house customisation operation.
The Coupe version is stock with grey-on-grey, with some red accents, while the Roadster, with its pair of awkward roof inserts, is blue.
There are ‘Y’ inserts in the seats or optional laser-cut ‘Y’ inserts cut into them in contrasting colours, while the ‘Ultimae’ name is embroidered onto the side bolsters of the seats.
There are three colours for the interior highlights in the seats, doors and dash, plus five more if you want to add to the cost, and there’s a carbon-fibre pack in either gloss or matt finishes.
Down below, there are new forged alloy wheels, with colours that are echoed in the six-piston front and four-piston rear brake callipers.
Like all Lamborghnis, the Ultimae lacks an ANCAP safety rating and is backed by a lacklustre three-year/unlimited-km warranty.
Powertrain and Performance
The core glory of the Aventador stems from Lamborghini’s aversion to turbochargers in its hypercars, making the V12 the last of the big-banger motors – ever – with naturally-aspirated breathing.
In 2022 Lamborghini LP780-4 Aventador Ultimae form, that means the power rises from the Aventador S’s 544kW of power to 574kW at an astonishing 8500rpm, and the swinging tacho needle hits the limiter at 8700rpm. So it’s an Aventador SVJ motor, but with more power.
One theoretical downside to turbo dodging is that the V12 lacks the low-end punch of a turbo motor (or, indeed, an EV or hybrid), so its 720Nm torque peak doesn’t chime in until 6750rpm – a point at which most mainstream motors have already changed up to the next gear.
That’s not such a concern in real life, because its sheer capacity gives it more than enough torque from idle for urban life, and the linear build-up of the engine’s output lets the driver enjoy a wonderful build-up of performance that pushes you deeper and deeper into the thinly-padded seats.
At 2.8 seconds, the sprint to 100km/h is plenty fast enough for most people and uncomfortably fast for others – though discomfort is par for the course for hypercars.
Its top speed is claimed to be 350km/h, though Italian magazines have regularly topped 355km/h in lesser Aventadors with less power, so it’s fast enough.
The brilliance of it – the part that keeps you coming back – is the instant throttle response and the way the engine note moves from calm to a deep-throated threat to frantic screaming at 8700rpm.
The best way to live with it isn’t just by blasting to the rev-limiter and changing gear (though there is much to recommend that as a strategy), but by grabbing a taller gear, like fourth, and pinning the throttle from about 3000rpm.
That way the engine climbs out of its relative slumber from idle, then the exhausts open up and the depth of its tone plummets as suddenly as a mine’s elevator with a broken cable. Then you feel every single timbre change as the revs climb and, from 6000rpm, everything becomes a riot of revs that you get swept away with.
It’s one of the most amazing experiences in the car world, and while its time is drawing to a close, it’s still awe-inspiring.
Driving and Comfort
It’s a bit of a shock to fire up the 2022 Lamborghini Aventador Ultimae and find it settling calmly into a gently gruff idle, with no shattering of adjacent windows, but this is the 21st century.
The seating position is very low, and the adjustment of the seat itself is limited, but the steering column adjusts with more than enough range to make most people comfortable.
Less inspiring is the multimedia system, circa 2011 Audi A6, with a small screen, basic navigation and rudimentary colour profiles. Fortunately, it can hook up to Apple CarPlay or Android Auto (via a cable) to give a more contemporary navigation and entertainment experience.
The instrument cluster, though, still looks as fresh as it did in 2011 and flashes through different colours and designs as you roll through the modes, via the buttons centre console.
Its suspension gives a remarkably honest appraisal of the road maker’s handiwork as you roll out of a car park and onto the street, and it continues to do so until you deliver more cornering energy into the springs.
Oddly, the harder you corner the Aventador, the better the ride quality becomes, and while it never quite comes together as a cohesive, intuitive whole, it does attack bends willingly and effectively and brutally.
Corners are to be dispensed with, rather than savoured, because they’re in the way of the V12’s opera, if opera were to be perfected by fleets of axe-wielding Viking longboats bent on destruction.
The Diablo and Murcielago before it always let the drivers know they were in an armwrestle for control, all the time. The Aventador has moved on from that philosophy, but not totally, and it’s a difficult car to feel completely at one with, just because there are inconsistencies in the way its control surfaces are weighted.
Back when the Aventador launched in 2011, there were arguments had with Lamborghini about its main flaws, and the Lamborghini LP780-4 Aventador Ultimae hasn’t lost any of them.
Firstly, the most obvious of them is the ISR gearbox, and there’s a good reason why no production car used it before the Aventador and why no car company plans to use it in a production car after the Aventador.
It’s awful.
It was chosen because the long, skinny Graziano-built “independent shifting rods” gearbox was the only thing available that could fill the hole, literally, in the carbon-fibre chassis tub.
The trouble with it is that, while it shifts in 50 milliseconds when fully roused in the track mode, it is not nice to use.
Like much with the Aventador, there was fiddling from product marketing to contrive easily noticed differences in the modes, and the gearbox also suffered because of it.
Its shifts are slow and slurred in the Strada mode, and seem to take an age to pick up the throttle again after each shift. They are considerably rougher in the Sport mode and they are unbearable in the Corsa mode, where they crack through with so much fury that they can unsettle the suspension in fast corners.
You can outsmart it all by giving the throttle a little lift and reapplication each time you pull on the gearshift paddle, but if a driver can work that out, why can’t Lamborghini’s software engineers?
Likewise, the suspension of the Aventador just never quite came together to provide a cohesive whole, and it never became (like the Gallardo and the Huracan did) one of those cars that shrink around you when you push harder.
It remained remote from you, and what’s worse, the skid-control set-ups were also contrived to deliver relatively early onset understeer in the strada mode, lairy oversteer in Sport mode and it only gave its actual, pure best in Corsa mode, and that’s too brutal for public streets.
Editor’s Opinion
And so the Aventador leaves as it came in: a deeply frustrating and sometimes annoying combination of brilliance and stuff squeezed in to fit, of engineering genius and engineering genius misdirected by marketing wiles, and of surprising comfort and hopeless impracticality.
The people who buy Aventadors are very different to the people who buy Huracans, and wouldn’t dream of driving them as their daily machine. That’s why its quirks are less critical in the hypercar than they would be in the supercar.
But they exist, nonetheless, and have long held it back from the car it might have been.
Thing is, though, you can forgive a lot for an engine like this. And the Lamborghini Aventador LP780-4 Ultimae does, indeed, have an engine like this.
Farewell, old man.
How much does the 2022 Lamborghini LP780-4 Aventador Ultimae Coupe cost?Price: $904,419 (plus on-road costs)Available: Late 2022Engine: 6.5-litre petrol V12Output: 574kW/720NmTransmission: Seven-speed ISR automaticFuel: 18.0L/100kmCO2: 442g/km
Safety rating: TBC
Keyword: Lamborghini Aventador Ultimae 2022 Review – International