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While Lamborghini is looking forward to an electric future, promising to add electric supercars to its lineup soon, the company hasn’t given up on combustion engines yet.
CEO, Stephan Winkelmann, says Lamborghini is looking for ways to keep the combustion engine alive past 2030, which is the date many automakers have declared they’ll only be selling EVs.
“After hybridization, we will wait and see whether it will be possible to offer vehicles with a combustion engine beyond 2030,” Winkelmann says. “One possibility would be to keep the combustion engines alive with synthetic gasoline.”
Synthetic petrol is already being looked into by Porsche, Lamborghini’s stablemate in the VW Group. It’s said to be greener than regular petrol, but it takes a lot of energy to produce. And if the energy being used to produce the synthetic fuel isn’t renewable, its ‘green’ status is questionable.
According to studies, the fuel is only green in small quantities. Experts have suggested it be reserved for the industries that can’t go all-electric, like long-distance trucking and flying.
With Formula 1 investing in synthetic fuel technology, it’ll begin to have an association with high-performance vehicles.
“We expect our customers to accept these cars – if the promise is kept that the performance of the vehicles is better than that of the previous generation,” says Winkelmann. “The combination with the electric drive will bring more power to our vehicles, coupled with a better CO2 balance.”
Lamborghini is set to introduce its first hybrid in 2024 with its first pure electric vehicle to be unveiled before the end of the decade.
Winkelmann has previously hinted that the BEV will be a 2+2 or four-seater with crossover design tendencies.
Keyword: Lamborghini investigates synthetic fuel to keep combustion engines alive past 2030