Lamborghini Aventador review
The Lamborghini Aventador is big, bullish and ballistic, but it isn't perfect
If you’re going to drive a new Lamborghini Aventador, especially when clad in £2940 worth of optional Arancia Argos paint, you should slap a couple of accident black spot roundels on its flanks.
As a thing to drive, the Aventador is as safe as anyone could reasonably expect a 690bhp supercar with sub-3.0sec 0-62mph capability to be, but as a device to distract other drivers from the road ahead, its powers may be unprecedented. You might never crash yourself, but you’re going to see plenty.
But is this not exactly what owners seek from such a car? Is an Aventador, like its forefathers the Murcielago, Diablo and Countach, not an attention-seeking device first and a thoroughbred driving machine second?
Maybe, but that doesn’t mean its existence is not to be celebrated. Among mainstream production cars – which excludes esoteric models such as Paganis and Koenigseggs built in single or double-digit numbers – the Aventador now stands alone.
Although the Aventador is laden with state-of-the-art technology, at its heart it remains a supercar of the old school, a massively wide, impossibly low machine powered by a outrageously powerful and classic normally aspirated V12 – words that would have applied no less accurately to the Countach at its first public showing more than 40 years ago.
For now, the Aventador is available only as a £247,668 coupé, although the Roadster has just been announced with a two-piece carbonfibre targa top weighing just 6kg that can be removed and stored in the Aventador’s nose. Sales start in the summer for a price approaching £300,000.
design
Unlike the Murcielago, which was a highly evolved Diablo, the Aventador is entirely new, so Lamborghini has taken the opportunity to sit down and draw up what appears to be the dream supercar specification. Full carbonfibre monocoque? Check. Clean-sheet 6.5-litre V12 motor? What else? Race-derived pushrod suspension? Natch.
But it wouldn’t be a Lamborghini without looks as distracting to motorists as an Eva Herzigova Wonderbra billboard. Design in-house by Lamborghini Centro Stile, its shape alone is all that some will need to be convinced it’s a good place to park a quarter of a million readies. It includes a deployable rear spoiler and also huge cooling vents that emerge from its flanks when the variably valve timed, quad-cam, 48-valve motor threatens to overheat.
The gearbox is a robotised seven-speed manual with, says Lamborghini, the quickest shift ever to be achieved from such a configuration. The company says it chose it over a dual-clutch automatic system like that now favoured by Ferrari because it is both lighter and more compact. There is no three-pedal option.
Power flows through the gearbox to all four corners of the car in a ratio governed by a central Haldex coupling. There’s an electronically controlled differential at the front and a mechanically locking item between the rear wheels.
interior
All mid-engined V12 Lambos of the past 40 years have had scissor doors, a tradition the Aventador is not about to break.
They draw gasps from your passenger but offer only rather awkward access to the interior and an inelegant escape during which the tall must take care not to crack their cranium on the upswept edge of the door.
Once inside, however, there is a feast for your eyes in the form of a TFT instrument panel that looks like a refugee from some abandoned skunkworks fighter aircraft. And unlike most eye-catching instruments, this one also really works. So it’s such a shame to see a central navigation display plundered from a previous-generation Audi A4, along with its barely disguised MMI switchgear.
When Ferrari created the 456 in 1992, it threw away all the visible Fiat parts bin components that had so blighted their interiors for years, but 20 years on and despite that colossal list price, it’s a lead Lamborghini appears disinclined to follow.
But at least it means the cabin is easy to understand and operate. And while the Aventador’s brand new design has not brought a perfect driving position (we’d have preferred a touch more longitudinal travel on both the seat runners and steering wheel), visibility is surprisingly good, given how low and wide it is.
Boot space is impressive, too, but storage opportunities on board are negligible. The glovebox is minuscule and there’s a lidded box between the seats that provides somewhere to put the disappointingly obviously Audi key but little else.
performance and engineering
Lamborghini says the Aventador is now in that most exclusive club of cars that will take you from rest to 62mph in under three seconds – 2.9sec, to be precise. And when you factor in its 690bhp, the traction afforded by its all-wheel drive and mid-engine configuration, coupled with a gut-busting launch control strategy and a gearbox that’ll upshift in 50 milliseconds, you’ll not doubt the numbers. We’d expect a 0-100mph of around 6.5sec too.
But while the car’s size, shape and power are undoubtedly intimidating, you acclimatise quickly. Indeed, so smooth and linear is the power delivery the actual kick in the kidneys feels less dramatic than a turbo car of probably fractionally inferior outright performance such as a McLaren MP4-12C.
In the finest traditions of great Italian V12s, the Aventador’s pulls from 1000rpm as if that was what it was born for, and then just keeps going on and on gently building in urge, sharpening its sound by degrees, reaching a shrieking crescendo just the other side of its 8250rpm power peak. Although an Aston V12 has a more musical note, this is undoubtedly one of the finest V12s even to be bolted into the back of a supercar.
If only the gearbox were able even to approach this standard. Small and light it may be, but it’s bad enough to knock an entire star off the rating for this section. It can be driven in manual or automatic mode, in either Strada or Sport setting, leaving the most extreme Corsa program as a manual-only option.
In any setting, the car is horrid to park because it appears unable to creep, while the automatic function is slow and jerky. So manual is the only sensible choice. In Strada, the gearshifts are simply too ponderous, while in Corsa they are so savage that the jolt can physically hurt; what it is doing to its mounts can only be imagined.
So Sport manual is the only one of five configurations that works effectively. Call it up and remember to lift off the gas between shifts and the Aventador can be driven smoothly, but it requires concentration – rather defeating the labour-saving point of having a paddle shift in the first place.
ride and handling
It is hard to see how Lamborghini chassis engineers could have driven the Aventador on UK roads and signed off the ride as fit for purpose. No one expects supercars to ride like limousines, but the Aventador’s lack of compliance, especially at low speeds, is bad enough to make you envy the occupants of any passing Number 49.
True, the ride smooths out to somewhere near acceptability as speeds rise, but the symptoms of a car with spring rates more suited to the track than the road remain, especially in the wet. The car is too inclined to understeer in slow corners, a trait accentuated by what feels to be a tight differential at the back. However, with all four wheels doing the pulling, traction is still outstanding.
And there’s good stuff here. The hydraulic steering is terrific, with perfect gearing and genuine feel, allowing you to position the car to the inch every time while grip lasts. And the faster you go, the better the car is; at low speeds the car is too inclined to let its nose run wide of the apex, but if you can find a long, open and wide curve and find the courage to pitch the Aventador in at the kind of speed that would see most normal cars pockmarking the countryside, it is close to brilliant.
Grip from those vast 335-section rear Pirellis is astounding, and should the car start to peel away from your intended line, the slightest lift brings it cleanly back. Contrary to all signals given at lower speeds, at these velocities the Aventador has real balance.
Predictably, the Aventador is fitted with mighty carbon-ceramic disc brakes. Their stopping power is extraordinary, although the initial bite of the pedal on the cold, damp roads that coincided with our test was poor.
MPG
If you look at a car like a McLaren 12C with a similar power-to-weight ratio, you may goggle at the fact that while it can manage 24.2mpg, on the same cycle the Aventador does just 16.4mpg.
Then again, relative to the 13.7mpg of the most recent Murcielago, some would call that progress. Either way, the prospect of adding an extra kilo of CO2 to the atmosphere for every 2.5 miles would be sobering were Lamborghini owners minded to think that way.
The Aventador's residual values are extremely strong at present, with prices for nearly new examples being quoted at more than £50,000 over list. Do not expect this to last.
Even so, the Murcielago has been a strong performer as a secondhand buy, limited supply leading to far stronger values than those of the rival Ferrari 599 GTB, so as long as Lamborghini keeps numbers down, this is a trend that is likely to be continued by the Aventador.
verdict
Compared with the Murcielago it replaces, the Aventador is as a supercomputer to an abacus, and were verdicts determined on such grounds alone, the Aventador would earn the full five stars.
In fact, it doesn’t even get near this ultimate accolade. In certain rare conditions where the roads are wide, open, quiet and immaculately surfaced, we can see a driver deriving as much enjoyment from an Aventador as he might from any other supercar – perhaps even more. But introduce even a few of the limitations of the real world and its composure starts to crack and crumble.
Two issues in particular are its undoing. By the standard of modern paddle-shift transmissions, the gearbox is poor even in its optimal configuration and simply unpleasant in any other. More damning still is the ride, which means that while there are some roads in the UK where the car can be enjoyed, the journey there and back is likely to be so uncomfortable that you might not even bother.
There are aspects of the Aventador we truly love; its looks and engine, for instance, are unquestionably landmarks of design and engineering. But not even they can lift the sense of disappointment that surrounds the rest of this car.
While it is undoubtedly lighter, quicker, stronger and stiffer than its predecessor, it is as a device to grab you by the heart and never let go that is the first duty of all V12 Italian supercars. And while here the Aventador takes an equally massive leap, this time it is in the wrong direction.
source: autocar.co.uk
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