The Lamborghini Urus sports utility vehicle surpasses everything Lamborghini does and has attracted many new customers to the more well-known brand for sports cars in the form of glass shards.
Supercar purists have severely criticized SUVs for incursing sports utility vehicles into their beloved brands. But Urus shows that even buyers of state-of-the-art exotic products find SUVs irresistible.
The 2021 Urus model year starts at almost $ 220,000, a very high price for an everyday family vehicle. This is really the Urus – a Lamborghini that anyone can drive every day and use as the countless SUVs that now fill segments in the middle of the car market.
The vehicle specs and reviews about the Urus indicate that the vehicle is impressively versatile. It can travel 0-62 miles per hour in 3.2 seconds – a remarkably fast acceleration for any vehicle, you don’t mind an SUV. And it’s built to handle like a proper sports car on a racetrack. But Lamborghini has also equipped the Urus for off-road driving – something Lamborghini is not known for.
But while some have said that the Urus could be the ultimate vehicle, there are some who have criticized its design for moving too far away from the sleek, jagged shapes that made the famous Lamborghini. Urus also upset some sports car purists, as did Porsche SUVs.
Some supercar manufacturers remain on the verge of SUV madness. The British manufacturer McLaren is one of these companies, saying that it does not need an SUV to remain profitable. It seems that other companies have given in to some reluctance. For example, Ferrari is working on its own SUV, after years of internal resistance.
Urus and its success are signs Lamborghini is becoming a different company from what it has been for most of its history. Now it has to survive in a market where sales of sport utility vehicles have increased dramatically. In the premium and super-premium segment alone, SUVs went from just under 12% of total global vehicle sales in 2000 to 50% in 2020, according to LMC Automotive.
Decades ago, vehicles such as the Jeep Cherokee, Ford Explorer and Toyota RAV4 began to bring to the table the concept of a sport utility vehicle. Now the latest generation producers, including some who have been resilient, see how the market is doing and decide not to fight it. Trends often shift from premium segments to the mass market, said Jeff Schuster, president of global forecasts for LMC Automotive.
“Now we see that reversal in which the main trend has led premium brands to introduce the SUV to their market,” he said.