Lamborghini celebrated its 50th anniversary last weekend by unveiling what it clearly believes is its most dramatic-ever concept car, the angry but not especially beautiful-looking Egoista.
Based on the current Gallardo but taking its cues from the Apache fighter helicopter, the Egoista is, according to its designer Walter De Silva, “designed for people who want the most extreme and most special things in the world. This car represents extremes of hedonism; it is a car without compromise. In a word, it is selfish".
Hmm. What I’d like to know, having been a fan of the way Lamborghinis look since the year dot, is what, precisely, the Egoista has got in common with the cars that Sant'Agata has produced over the previous five decades?
What sort of design homage, exactly, does the Egoista pay to the Miura, for example, or even the original 2003 Gallardo on whose mechanicals it is based?
Ever since Ferruccio Lamborghini formed his beloved car company in 1963 as a means of making better machines than his arch enemy Enzo Ferrari just up the road in Modena, Lamborghini has consistently produced some of the most beautiful-looking cars on the road.
But then about six or seven years ago, something changed at Lamborghini. A different mindset took over at Sant'Agata, and at a stroke the design houses of northern Italy that had helped create so many of the world’s most stunning-looking cars were universally shunned.
Instead, all design was brought in house, since when all Lamborghinis have become increasingly angular – if you’re being polite – or increasingly vulgar if you’re telling the truth.
As each new concept or actual model has appeared, the lines have become sharper and more awkward to look at – like shards of shattered carbon fibre – and the curves have continue to fade, presumably with the intention of appealing almost exclusively to that same selfish, hedonistic person at whom the Egoista is so squarely aimed.
But where will this seemingly deliberate eschewing of its past heritage leave Lamborghini in 10-15 years' time? And if the move to ignore what’s gone before really is deliberate, why are they making such strange decisions when most sports car makers would kill for a heritage like Lamborghini’s?
I simply refuse to believe that Sant'Agata has decided to cater for just one very particular type of customer – young, brash, loaded and lairy – to the detriment of all its other requirements, or customers.
One day, after all, such customers will surely grow older and wiser, and then maybe they won’t want a car that looks like it could cut you to pieces at 100 paces – at which point Lamborghini’s appeal will have narrowed to a point where the rest of us will simply no longer care. And then they really will be in trouble.
In the meantime, you’d have to hope that at some stage in the next few years, Lamborghini will realise that making beautiful cars is also key to its future, and that designing cars that look ultra-aggressive purely for the sake of it – and appeal to some of the world’s more odious egotists in the process – isn’t actually where salvation lies.
But at the moment they would appear to have their lost their way a bit at Sant'Agata. The trouble is, the road back will only get longer with every new styling gimmick that Lamborghini comes up with.
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