Lamborghini unveils new insane-looking electric supercar concept with supercapacitors

Lamborghini has been hesitant to implement all-electric powertrains to its supercars, but it has been increasingly electrifying its lineup of vehicles as parent company Volkswagen is pushing electric on all its brands.

Now the Italian automaker is unveiling its latest electric concept car: the Terzo Millennio.

It’s very much of a concept car and not something that we expect to see in production anytime soon, if ever, but it still features some interesting aspects worth mentioning.

First of all, the car is born out of a partnership between the automaker and two laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: the “Dinca Research Lab”, led by Prof. Mircea Dinca, Department of Chemistry and the “Mechanosynthesis Group”, led by Prof. Anastasios John Hart, Department of Mechanical Engineering.

Stefano Domenicali, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Automobili Lamborghini, says:

“Exactly one year ago we have signed an agreement with the MIT-Italy Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which marked the start of a collaboration between two outstanding entities for the creation of a project that intends to write an important page in the future of super sports cars for the third millennium.”

It resulted in some interesting technological aspects added to this concept, but let’s start by getting one thing out of the way: the design.

The car is simply insane-looking. It looks like something out of the future and yet, it still looks very much like a Lamborghini. Here are a few images that they released today:

The automaker wrote about the car’s design in a press release:

“The Terzo Millennio is the visionary outcome conceived by the Lamborghini Centro Stile to express future design elements, taking into account the radical changes in technology and anticipating elements of forthcoming Lamborghini design. An example for a very strong statement is the evolution and further development of the Lamborghini typical Y-signature in the front and rear lights.”

They are talking about a brand new aerodynamic structure for the company.

As for the technology powering this beast, Lamborghini went with 4 electric motors – one integrated into each wheel.

And as for the energy storage system to feed those 4 electric motors, the automaker is looking into the future and talking about using supercapacitors and instead of traditional li-ion batteries.

Supercapacitors are similar to batteries but unlike them, they can charge and discharge in just seconds. The drawback is that most of them have low energy density and can’t store enough energy to be viable for a product like an electric car, which requires significant energy capacity to travel long distances.

Several automakers and startups have ventured into adopting the technology to work for electric cars, like Fisker’s latest venture, but they ended up giving up on it and going back to good old Li-ion batteries.

Now it sounds like Lamborghini wants to give it a shot. Prof. Dinca said

“The new Lamborghini collaboration allows us to be ambitious and think outside the box in designing new materials that answer energy storage challenges for the demands of an electric sport vehicle. We look forward to teaming up with their engineers and work on this exciting project”.

Unfortunately, they didn’t reveal any specs enabled by this powertrain technology.

Electrek’s Take

I know it’s another concept and you want production cars, but that’s a ridiculous supercar anyway and they are at least working on some new technologies as they are developing it, which could eventually benefit other vehicles.

As for Lamborghini’s more serious electric car efforts, we learned last year that the automaker could be building an all-electric supercar based on the Porsche Mission E platform and that they want to make an electric plug-in version of its Urus SUV concept.

We expect to see those on the road before an electric Terzo Millennio.