Why Lamborghini Really Ditched The V10

We’ve had time to process the death of Lamborghini’s V10, but that doesn’t make us any sadder about its loss. The Temerario will soon go into production with a hybrid V8 engine, but was there ever any chance of the V10 living on? According to Lamborghini’s Chief Technical Officer, it would’ve been ‘nearly impossible’.

Speaking to UK media at a launch event for the Temerario with Car Throttle in attendance, Rouven Mohr has said that a new V10 was considered for the new car. However, the need to meet current and future emissions regulations, as well as the fear of stepping on the Revuelto’s toes brought an end to that.

Mohr said: “If you look at this segment in the last three, four, five years, the power level in this segment has been increased dramatically. So it means if we wanted to do another naturally-aspirated engine, like a V10 for instance, to go on the power level the market is requesting, with the current or future emissions regulations… I would not say it’s impossible but it's nearly impossible.

“Either you go with super high displacement, but then you come very close to the character of the V12 Revuelto. So you’d have two cars that, in character, are quite close.”

Instead, the Temerario’s beating heart is a 4.0-litre twin-turbocharged V8 with a screaming 10,000rpm redline. Despite matching the capacity of the VW Group’s copy-paste V8 as seen in the Urus, as well as several Porsche and Audi models, it’s a completely bespoke-to-Lamborghini unit.

Why didn’t the manufacturer just take that unit instead of developing something new? Rohr believes if Lamborghini had to use a V8 for this car, it needed to be its own thing.

“Everyone has a V8 twin-turbo engine, it’s not something unique” Rohr added. “We said okay, If we do this, we have to be sure that the engine has a very unique character”.

In its launch guise, the Temerario will produce 907bhp from the V8 combined with three electric motors –  789bhp of that coming from the internal combustion engine. On its own though, the V8 could be capable of producing over 1000bhp in a future model.

We asked where Rohr thinks the engine’s power ceiling is, to which he replied: “I don’t think it, I know it. Unfortunately I cannot tell you, but you can be sure it’s a four-digit number”. Expect some very, very exciting variants down the line, then…