This video is of the new Lamborghini Aventador. The engine starting sounds like nothing we’ve heard before in the auto industry.
My neighbor has this rusty old Chevy pickup truck from like 1950, and every time he starts it, my house shakes. I would love to exact revenge every morning by starting this beast:
Fabled test driver Valentino Balboni on Lamborghini’s latest creations…
Jamiroquai front man Jay Kay has some impressive toys. Known to Top Gear enthusiasts as the former Board-Topper (twice), Britain’s Fifth Gear took a tour of the superstar’s garage and play land, which includes everything from a Segway to a Rolls-Royces to any number of Go-Karts…
Video of his first appearance on Top Gear:
Video of Jay Kay’s 2nd record breaker:
Also, check out his review of the Lamborghini Miura on Top Gear:
Click to find out!
Is it possible that viral marketing videos from OEMs are growing old????
Very possible if you are Ford making a half-baked effort to compare the “new” Fiesta to a Lamborghini Gallardo. Presumably a few people watched this video, but no doubt all were disappointed. Even the “cupcake addict” failed to get me all that excited… Uff!
Your next drive: Lamborghini Gallardo LP-560-4
So let us say that you are looking for a fun weekend get-away for yourself or a loved one. Why not spend it touring one of Europe’s racetracks in a Lamborghini Gallardo at 160+ miles per hour.
Granted, at $3,900 (not including your flight, of course), the Lamborghini driving program is not what you would call cheap or affordable. But if you have a little cash lying around and want to try something that will get your pulse racing, may we suggest this???
From Lamborghini:
20 February 2009
WANT THE CHANCE TO DRIVE A LAMBORGHINI OR IMPROVE YOUR DRIVING SKILLS IN THE ULTIMATE SUPER SPORTS CAR? AUTOMOBILI LAMBORGHINI ANNOUNCES LAMBORGHINI ACADEMY PROGRAMME FOR 2009SANT’AGATA BOLOGNESE — Lamborghini has announced its new Lamborghini Academy dates for 2009. With courses open to all sports car enthusiasts as well as Lamborghini owners, the track driving schools provide an extraordinary opportunity to experience the full potential of Lamborghini cars, alongside the Italian super sports car manufacturer’s professional instructors.
The Track Academy course provides an entry into the Lamborghini Academy world. Held at various European race tracks from Spring 2009 onwards, participants’ driving skills are improved alongside a professional driver instructor, while exploring the full potential of the Lamborghini Gallardo LP 560-4.
The Advanced Academy is the top level programme, and concentrates on optimum control and performance on the race track, fully supported by a professional invehicle telemetry system. Driving is undertaken in the Gallardo LP 560-4 and the Murciélago LP 640: the fastest and most extreme super sports car in its class.
All classes include technical and safety briefings, followed by handling and performance exercises, with instruction on how to get the ‘ultimate kick’ from race track driving! Participants improve their handling and feel of Lamborghini’s permanent four-wheel drive cars, learn to manage understeer and oversteer; practice manoeuvres with and without ABS and ESP; master ‘controlled drifting’ and, of course, find the ideal ‘racing line’ on track.
As a reminiscence of this experience each individual participant gets his own in-car-video with footage of the whole driving day as well as a photo CD of all the action of the day on the race track.
Lamborghini Academy courses start from 3,900.00 euro, including accommodation, cars at the race track and all driving instruction, but excluding travel. For full details, go to www.lamborghiniacademy.com, or contact your local Lamborghini dealer.
The economy is hurting and more and more carmakers are suffering. Not all are doing poorly, though. Audi, as an example reported record sales for 2008, with over 1,000,000 vehicles sold. Lamborghini, owned by the VW/Audi Group, also posted record sales for 2008. Both companies produce sports cars that retail at over US$100,000.
Let us examine the developments of the last month by automaker:
Porsche. There is no substitute for a strong economy. A poor economy negatively impacted sales at the sports car maker, and even a significantly revised 911 model did not save it from a virtual sales slump. Porsche is tighter with numbers than most companies, but while sales were slowing, the company hopes that new models in 2009 will help it combat slumping sales. A four-door car, the Panamera should hit showroom floors in the first half of 2009, while you can expect to drive a 2009 Boxster/Cayman with revised powertrain as soon as March.
In financial news the company announced the first week of January that they had bought an additional 8.16 per cent stake in VW worth 6.1bn Euro/US$8.2bn. Porsche now owns 50.76 per cent of VW Group but may gain further stake in VW, rising to 75 per cent in coming months (if all goes as planned). In November, news came out that Germany’s upper house of parliament passed new laws regarding ownership of VW, despite European Commission rulings that such laws were illegal.
In November, the high profit-maker in the world gobbled up a stake, which sent hedge funds scrambled to recover from trading, which briefly left VW as the most valuable company in the world. Porsche’s finance team effectively practiced something called “cornering”. Let us not forget that Porsche is better as an investor than as a carmaker – though they are a damned good carmaker. In 2007, the company made 3.6 billion Euros on investments, and only a paltry 1 billion Euros on cars. At a 12 per cent profit margin, the decision to invest in VW stands financial positioning, and partly seeking a partner with whom to share technology development costs.
Still, everyone is watching the dollars and cents these days. Even Porsche has announced that is it pulling out of the American LeMans series for 2009 – in part. It is pulling the P2 team, but not pulling support for the 911 GT3 RSRs in the GT2 category.
Mercedes-Benz. Mercedes has finally announced the much-anticipated E-class for 2009. The new car replaces the round headlights with more rectangular ones, perhaps in the style of the C-class or a Lexus.
Well, the world’s largest Lamborghini dealership has closed this year as well as the largest Chevy dealer.
Orange County Lamborghini apparently closed its doors, though the site remains: LAMBORGHINI ORANGE COUNTY
According to Leftlane New the company’s management struggled, despite the dealership being quite successful with some exclusive clientele for which most luxury goods makers would kill. It’s unclear which part of the family business is failing, however, as Vik is the property owner, but the dealership owners are actually Nora, Sossi, and Astrid, his sisters. One possibility is that cash flow is weak following the 2007 purchase of an Audi-VW dealership in Santa Ana. Either way, the business lesson to be learned is that cash flow is not safe in the down economy.
Unless you have been living in a cave the last two years, you know that Porsche’s strong financial position has allowed them to make a gradual play for VW’s shares. In fact it is just the latest in what has been a long-time partnership between the two + Audi. You may recall that many years ago Audi+Porsche dealerships often shared the same building.
But what we really didn’t know until recently was how Porsche might use VW in their product portfolio. Remember that the VW Touareg , Audi Q7, and Porsche Cayenne share the same platform. The benefit being significantly cheaper development costs. Bear in mind that Porsche has had a benefit in this partnership of releasing their Cayenne before VW and Audi have released their products. Ironically, it is the smashing success of the Cayenne product line that has given Porsche the ability to launch a takeover of VW.
Are Ferrari and most other supercar makers immune to economic recession? That was the question that everyone wanted an answer to because the “just how bad is it?” gets answered when we financial figures.
Ferrari released this press statement verbatim on October 27:
“Maranello, October 27th, 2008 – The Board of Directors of Ferrari SpA met today under the chairmanship of Luca di Montezemolo, to examine the third quarter results. Ferrari recorded 450 million in revenues (up 22.3 percent year-over-year), and a trading profit of 79 million (17.6 percent of revenues), up 41.1 percent from the 56 million figure (15.2 percent of revenues) for Q3 2007.
(more…)
How pleased Lamborghini must be that it’s latest supercar, the Murciélago LP640 has just co-starred with Cristian Bale in the latest Batman flick, the Dark Knight. Who knows if Lambo paid dearly for the product placement, but a 155+ million dollar opening weekend is sure to get them a ton of free advertising.
Auto companies are masters at product placement.
A few examples:
Tons of other examples exist, I am sure someone will point out the cars from Bullitt and Miami Vice, too…
Look for the ultra-exclusive Lamborghini Reventón to appear in a yet-to-be-determined film sometime soon!
This week’s Link of the Week is pretty cool. Because of their rarity, non-millionaire fans of supercars can often find it difficult to get behind the wheel of the world’s flashiest and fastest cars. Even millionaires find it difficult to choose with a record number of supercars available for public consumption.
If you’ve ever wanted to spend the day “testing” a variety of supercars at supercar speeds, there’s a new option for you.
It’s called Supercar Life.
The LA Times has written about the program here: http://www.latimes.com/classified/automotive/highway1/la-fi-garage26apr26,0,4314202.story
Supercar profits used to be a pipe dream. It was only a year ago that we told you the story of how companies like Aston Martin and Ferrari were making money hand over fist. Today it was Lamborghini’s turn as they announced financial results for 2007. 2007 was indeed quite a year.
Enjoying paying US$3+ for that gallon of gas? Didn’t think so. But don’t worry the Middle Easterners are more than happy to sell your their pricey car juice. And they’ll use it to buy themselves a Ferrari! Super!
Aston Martins, Ferraris, and Lamborghinis are selling like hot cakes in the land of sand, so get yours before the list gets too long…
Photo courtesy Ferrari.
In our most recent posting we pointed out that Aston Martin was integral to Ford’s Premier Auto Group, not just because it represented Ford’s presence in the supercar market, but because it was also profitable.
Profitability is something that once eluded supercar makers such as Aston, Ferrari, and Lamborghini, even Porsche at times. We noted that Aston Martin is, according to Ford, now a profitable unit. As Ford does not publish profitability for each of the PAG’s units, we will have to take their word for it, but we do know they sold over 5000 cars in 2006.
Take a look at Lamborghini, which according to the company, pretax profits rose to €18.1 million in 2006. That’s a 4.5-fold increase from 2005 when profits were only €4.4 million. CEO Stephan Winkelmann has said, “We have a complete model range, which is the youngest we’ve ever had. We are now a real car manufacturer.” While the “real-ness” of Lamborghini’s product line may be debatable, they do have 10-cylinder and 12-cylinder models, the Gallardo and Murciélago, respectively. Both models feature a coupe and roadster version.
Doing very simple math, without consideration for one time write offs/sales, we can note the following per car sales for 2006:
|
Manufacturer |
Profit (pretax) |
Production (# of cars produced) |
Per car profit |
|
Lamborghini |
€ 18,000,000 |
2095 |
€ 8,591.89 |
|
Ferrari |
€ 183,000,000 |
5671 |
€ 32,269.44 |
|
Aston Martin |
N/A |
5000 |
N/A |
|
Porsche |
€ 1,390,000,000 |
86426 |
€ 16,083.12 |
Porsche is the most profitable auto manufacturer in Europe, but per car averages put Ferrari impressively on top. Aston Martin and Pagani do not post numbers officially, but Aston reports a profit, however small that may be. Bottom-line, money CAN be made in supercars!
At Beyond the KM, we find that automotive news is a love-hate sort of relationship. We loved the new Porsche Turbo, but we hate the new Kia Rondo (and every Kia for that matter). We love new safety devices like Mercedes S-Class radar-guided cruise control, but hate when it fails.
Thus the relationship continues this week when Ford announced that it was resurrecting the Taurus name. As we stated months prior, we LOVED when they ditched the Taurus, and we HATE that they are bringing back the nameplate.
It is not to say that Taurus is the worst name for a car, certainly, the Sable (also being resurrected) is worse, and Lamborghini does name many of their cars after bull fighting legends (think Murciélago and Miura). The problem we have always had is that the Taurus name, while having seen heavy investment over the years, still stands for mediocrity. Would a food maker name a new flavor of cheese “the moldy, stinky jack” ??? We don’t think so.
In essence Ford is trying to resurrect a car that is not selling well hoping that the mediocrity of its predecessor will not drive buyers further away. The move by Ford proves mediocrity in the marketing organization and will likely show that no matter how fanciful the name, if you are producing junk, people won’t buy it. American carmakers still don’t seem to take cue from the Europeans and Japanese that quality is more important than nameplate. Chevy NOVA anyone?
Yes, it’s that time of the year, the picks for the best cars as of Winter 2007.
Which European cars are by matter of fact, “the best”? Find out below:
Best Supercar over $500,000: Bugatti Veyron 16.4
Best Supercar under $500,000: Lamborghini Gallardo Spyder
Best Ultra Luxury Convertible: Rolls-Royce Phantom Drophead Coupé
Best Ultra Luxury Sedan: Rolls-Royce Phantom
Best Ultra Luxury Coupé: Bentley GT
Best Hot Hatchback: VW GTI
Best Hot Sedan: Audi S8
Best sound: (tie) Ferrari 599 GTB/Ferrari F430
Best sports car under $100,000: Porsche 911 Carrera S
Best sports car over $100,000: Aston Martin DB9 Volante
Best new sports car: Aston Martin V8 Vantage
Best Small Car: Mini Cooper S (John Cooper Works Edition)
Best Old Car Experience: Caterham Lotus 7 SV
Most economical and fun sports car: Lotus Elise
Mid-sized Sedan: BMW M5
Best Car for Old People Who Don’t Give a Damn: Mercedes-Benz S65 AMG
Best SUV: Mercedes-Benz G55 AMG
Best minivan/mpv (yes, I’m ACTUALLY including this category): Mercedes-Benz R63 AMG
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