Lamborghini's mission to disrupt the future

Lamborghini doesn't just make supercars, it invented them. Certainly, there were fast, expensive cars before Lamborghini came along. But nothing was ever like a Lamborghini. The Italian automaker's creations were low to the ground and made to slip under the air. The engines were big and loud and sat right behind the two seats. The doors opened up into the air.

Now, the Italian automaker is taking on a new challenge: To develop a way to make supercars emissions-free, without using the lithium-ion batteries other automakers are relying on. Today's battery technology simply won't do, insists Maurizio Reggiani, chief technical officer at Lamborghini. Batteries are too heavy, too bulky and they can't perform at a high level for long enough. After a lap or two around a twisting race track at speeds reaching 160 miles per hour, where fast acceleration and hard braking are repeated over and over, a battery can begin to give out. Also, batteries are bulky and heavy and weight is the enemy of high performance. Lamborghini has been working with researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology since late 2017 on two possible solutions.

One is a new form of battery made from carbon that can actually make up some of the internal body parts of the car so they don't add size or weight. The other is a different kind of energy storage altogether: a supercapacitor.