Lamborghini going green!

We never noticed it on the last Full Throttle tour - mainly due to our unconstrained excitement – but the Lamborghini factory at Sant’Agata Bolognese is undergoing an environmentally sensitive upgrade.

An array of solar panels on the roof is making headway into reducing the company’s CO2 emissions, with the company claiming that the 1582 Megawatt hour system will reduce its carbon dioxide output by 20 per cent.

Couple that with a new insulation system for the entire factory roof, and a new, cleaner air-conditioning system and Lamborghini is adding a further 10 per cent energy saving to that target.

This means that by the factory measures alone, by 2010 Lamborghini will have gone “green” to the effect of a 30 per cent C02 reduction.

Not bad when you consider that the vehicles will also have its CO2 reduced by 35 per cent by the year 2015, but it’s how Lamborghini is going to achieve that which will be interesting.

R&D is being focussed on key areas. A press release tells us that Lamborghini will spend time investigating, among other things, “Start-and-Stop systems, hybrid drive train solutions” and “biofuels”.

To fund this, President and CEO Stephan Winkelmann says the company will invest 35 million Euros.

Other roads to be travelled down are weight reduction, friction reduction, and improving combustion efficiency – a natural way to bring down the CO2.

Having driven one of the new machines on the “greener” program, we can confirm Lamborghini hasn’t lost its way as a supercar maker.

With the demonstration of the LP560-4 already having its CO2 reduced by 18 per cent over the previous Gallardo, but being a more devastating machine, we’re looking forward to Lamborghini’s greener future.