Lamborghini and MIT have had a meeting of the minds. The question presented to the collaboration was this: if you could develop the ideal all-electric hypercar concept—a concept car that would address not only 20th-century issues of driver adrenaline and design flash, but also less easily addressed 21st-century hypercar issues like fossil-fuel resources and eco-footprint—what would you come up with?
The imaginative answer is the Terzo Millennio, Lambo’s first all-electric hypercar concept. Sure, it looks fun to drive, and it’s got the lines of a futuristic, four-wheeled comic-book sweetheart. But it’s not all fun and good looks. There’s a very capable intellect in there, as well.
First off, the powertrain. The Terzo Millennio gets a quartet of motors, as expected, but the motors aren’t driven by battery power, a heavy and—in twenty-odd years, anyway—woefully or quaintly past-tense means of kinetics. Instead, the super-efficient vehicle gets its juice from supercapacitors, reducing charge times and increasing range dramatically.
The body itself becomes the battery for the Terzo Millennio. The carbon-fiber body panels of the car are layered with a material which stores the energy, perhaps graphene, and therein rests the charge. Very cool. And recycled braking power helps increase the charge time and range of the car, too.
Most sci-fi—or perhaps preternatural, automotively speaking—is the idea that a car like the Terzo Millennio could actually repair itself. The idea is that the car would isolate and assess structural damage and use onboard ‘healing chemistries’ to return the car to homeostasis. Very, very cool.
As for now, well, the Terzo Millennio is only a concept. But the tech is coming, and Lamborghini’s vision of the shape of hypercars to come may not be so terribly far away.
