10 Coolest Lamborghini Concept Cars Ever Made

Ask anyone what the most extravagant, extreme, and fastest car in the world is and there is a significant chance the answer would be Lamborghini. Once a fledgling luxury sports car maker started by a tractor manufacturing magnate, it has since grown into a premier supercar maker and an absolute legend. Now in its 60th year of operation, Lamborghini sets the standard for outrageous supercars. It has made headlines with brash and innovative models that have also set standards for others to follow. The Miura, the first mid-engined supercar, and its successor, the Countach, set aside every norm with the most garish and aggressive, yet enduring shape imaginable.

While most of the models that made it to regular production tend to look more like alien spaceships than ordinary passenger cars, others that never make it to the factory floor are even wilder. Like every auto manufacturer, Lamborghini performs exercises in design to discover in what direction to take future models and to hash out ideas in general. This usually takes shape as concept cars never intended to go into production. Many of them were never meant to be driven while others have been lost to history. Lamborghini has a tradition of showcasing daring concepts as design studies, giving us a glimpse of what designers might do if given free rein over the process. While few concepts from this company could be seen as dull, odd, or undesirable, these 10 are definitely the coolest.

Throughout Lamborghni's history, Italian styling house Bertone has been a partner in creating the car's designs. As a part of the design process, Bertone has also come up with several concepts for Lamborghini, often showcased at events such as the Turin Motor Show, where the Bertone-designed Bravo was displayed in 1974.

The Bravo is based on the Urraco chassis and uses the same V8 engine to power it. Wedge-shaped concepts were very much in vogue in the early '70s, which is evident in this concept as well as the production Countach, perhaps the most famous wedge vehicle of all. Bertone had hoped this car would make its production as a lower-priced two-seater below the Countach and as a companion to the Urraco. Although this would never happen, the Bravo demonstrated what Bertone was capable of. The Bravo is a sleek design with straight lines to cut through the air and a glass wraparound canopy offering wide-open views on three sides. It also used the familiar five-hole wheel design of the Countach making what could have been an appropriate addition to Lamborghini's offerings.

The sleek Bravo with its Alcantara interior was not to be in the end. Lamborghini was still a small independent automaker back then, and the available budget limited what it could conceivably put into production, so the Bravo remained only a concept. One example remains, and it was painted white at some point before eventually falling into private hands at an RM Sotheby's sale in 2011 for €588,000.

[Featured image by Unknown Photographer via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | Public domain]

It might be confusing to find a Chrysler vehicle included in a discussion of Lamborghini concept vehicles, but it does belong. Chrysler bought the Lamborghini company in 1987 and immediately set to work capitalizing on each company's strengths in coming up with new products and designs. In the end, the fruits of this relationship appear to have benefitted Chrysler's development more than Lamborghini, although it was the parent company's finances that ensured production of the Diablo would happen, and we should be thankful for that.

The Portofino concept car bears the names of both companies, as it is a Chrysler concept but rides on all Lamborghini rolling stock. The underpinnings come from the V8 Jalpa and are powered by the same 3.5-liter engine making 255 horsepower. Furthermore, it is a four-door sedan but retains the mid-engine setup of the donated chassis. The curvy and swooping design was a huge departure from the squared-off cars of the time, and the vertically opening doors, front and rear, made it obvious it was never to be a regular production vehicle.

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The one car that was built is a fully functioning automobile. It never made it to production, but styling from it ended up in the Dodge Intrepid and the spoiler made it to the Dodge Stealth. Today, it can still be seen at the Chrysler Museum in Detroit.

The Terzo Millennio is one of Lamborghini's most recent concepts and a clear indication of what the company is thinking for the future of its vehicle development. Developed in conjunction with MIT in 2017, the Terzo Millennio is an all-electric concept vehicle and is probably the wildest design to ever come from the Sant'Agata Bolognese company.

While Lamborghni's history has had its powerful V12 as an integral part, the company is also one known for pushing the boundaries and not being left behind by the competition. In this spirit, it produced this car as an exercise in how to build an EV the Lamborghini way, which means pushing all boundaries. For now, the only boundary outwardly being pushed is in design, as the Terzo Millenio is but a shell of what can be a car. Unlike other production-ready concepts from the company, this one is purely an exercise. However, it is an exercise that involves genuine research with MIT in coming up with cutting-edge solutions to electric mobility, such as supercapacitors that can charge and discharge in an instant, providing tremendous power on demand.

As an experiment in style, it is a rousing success. The outrageous curves and angles that form the unorthodox shape of this car are stunning. Notably, the long-sloping windshield that terminates almost at the front edge of the car suggests a driving position shifted further forward than anything else. The overall look including the illuminated wheels and integrated spoilers make it unmistakably Lamborghini and something new at the same time. If this is the future, things are looking pretty good.

Most Lamborghini fans know well the LM002 off-roader made in the '80s, but may not know the genesis for that production vehicle. It started in the late '70s as a cash-strapped Lamborghini looked for ways to expand its business and bring in some much-needed revenue. As many automobile manufacturers do, it made an attempt to get into the business of manufacturing vehicles for national defense. What would morph into the LM002 began as the Cheetah.

The Cheetah is a rugged all-terrain vehicle built on a tubular steel cage chassis with a Chrysler V8 mounted in the rear and driving all four wheels. It has four-wheel independent suspension rolling on oversized tires meant to easily navigate soft terrain such as sand. As a military vehicle, few accessories were included except for the ability to attach weapons overhead, including machine guns, grenade launchers, and TOW missiles. Testing was performed in the American Southwest and the U.S. Army acquired ten copies for evaluation. However, the rear-mounted engine caused poor handling and the 180-horsepower V8 engine was underpowered.

The Army declined to order any Cheetahs and would adopt the HMMWV a few years later, leaving Lamborghini with nothing to show for its efforts. The Cheetah was officially abandoned, but the concept would come up later and eventually make it into the consumer all-terrain LM002.

When Volkswagen purchased Lamborghini, several projects were already underway and the new management needed to figure out how it would move the company forward while implementing changes to ensure it made a sound investment. This meant some projects would be canceled and others would be created. One project that today shows a vision of what could have been in the canceled Lamborghini Calà, which gives a glimpse of how the next model might have looked without the change of ownership.

During the development of the Diablo, a second smaller car was being developed with styling by long-time designer Marcelo Gandini. This car was to have a 4.0-liter V10 and was known as P140. This idea was later canceled and Gandini parted ways with Lamborghini, taking his ideas and applying them to the over-the-top Cizeta V16T. The idea was picked back up as the company had only the Diablo to sell by 1994, so Italdesign, famed designer Giorgetto Giugiaro's firm, was commissioned to design it.

The new design eschewed the straight line and sharp crease in favor of soft curves and rounded corners that had become the norm of 1990's automobile design. The result was a smashing and modern design of beautiful proportions. It received an original 400-horsepower V10 fed air through unique ram-air style scoops sitting atop each rear quarter panel, looking much like the intake on the bottom of an F-16. It's a shame the project was canceled as this is perhaps the most successful ready-for-production design of any Lamborghini concept. VW recognized the need for an entry-level model but set forth plans that would yield the Gallardo a few years later.

[Featured image by Odysseus 86 via Wikimedia Commons | Cropped and scaled | CC BY-SA 3.0]