A little over a year ago, Lamborghini announced that it was
collaborating with students and professors at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) on future car technologies.
The first fruit of their
collaboration has been revealed in concept form today, and boy, it's something
else. It's an all-electric hypercar called the Terzo Millennio—Italian for
"Third Millennium"—and it's packed with all sorts of wild tech.
With the Terzo Millennio, Lamborghini is attempting to
answer a seemingly simple question asked by the company's chief technical
officer, Marurizio Reggiani—"what is the super sports car of the
future?" For Lamborghini, that means an electric car, but one unlike
anything else we've ever seen.
Lamborghini wants an electric car that can run three or four
laps of the Nurburgring Nordschleife in a row at full tilt, then completely
recharge within a few minutes. And all the while, it has to provide the
performance and emotional experience you expect from a Lamborghini.
Lamborghini's collaboration with MIT is focused in two
areas—energy-storage systems, and material science. The results are as
crazy-futuristic as you'd expect from MIT professors and their PhD. students.
Prof. Mircea Dinca of MIT's chemistry department, and his
laboratory, the Dinca Research Lab, worked on the energy-storage system for the
Terzo Millennio. Instead of conventional batteries, the Terzo Millenio uses
supercapacitors, which can provide great power and recover and harvest kinetic
energy at the same time. On top of that, supercapacitors don't age as quickly
batteries, making them ideal for car use.
Supercapacitors don't yet have quite the same level energy
density as the batteries used in electric cars, though, so that's where Prof.
Dinca comes in. His lab is working towards creating parity between
supercapacitors and batteries.
These supercapacitors will drive four wheel-mounted electric
motors, that give the Terzo Millennio all-wheel drive, and wild torque
vectoring capabilities. Lamborghini will soon debut a conventional plug-in
hybrid drivetrain for the Urus, but this concept shows where the company really
wants to head with electrification.
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