Yahoo Autos Inside the Lamborghini Temerario's Hybrid V-8: Bull's Shift
From the September/October issue of Car and Driver.
The Lamborghini Temerario marks the end of the Italian automaker's two-decade love affair with the V-10 engine. Lambo's latest entry-level sports car forgoes the formula of the Huracán and the Gallardo before it, with their naturally aspirated 10-cylinders, and instead relies on a twin-turbo V-8 and a trio of electric motors.
The new V-8's double overhead cams, four valves per cylinder, turbos mounted in the valley of the V, and 4.0-liter displacement might lead you to suspect it's related to the 4.0-liter V-8 that powers the Urus SUV (and other Volkswagen Group vehicles), but the Temerario's engine is an entirely clean-sheet design.
Lamborghini's new engine has a bore of 90.0 millimeters and a stroke of 78.5 millimeters. The unfashionably oversquare engine includes a flat-plane crankshaft, a surprising choice given the ease of routing evenly spaced exhaust pulses to inboard-mounted turbochargers with a cross-plane crank.
"The flat crank also provides benefits on the intake side," says Rouven Mohr, Lamborghini chief technical officer. "And it produces the great sound that we wanted."
With a 10,000-rpm redline and the turbos churning out 20.3 psi of boost, the V-8 pushes out 789 horsepower from 9000 to 9750 rpm and 538 pound-feet of torque from 4000 to 7000 rpm.
An electric motor mounts to the output end of the crankshaft. Its available 148 horses and 221 pound-feet aid the engine's limited low-end thrust and mitigate any low-speed lag from the sizable turbos.
Two additional 148-hp electric motors service the front axle, each powering an individual front wheel. The three motors, all of which draw juice from a 3.4-kWh battery pack, never make peak power simultaneously because the system supports a maximum of only 187 electric horses at once.
Still, that's enough grunt to push the entire powertrain's peak power and torque figures up to a combined 907 horses and 590 pound-feet, sums that best the outgoing Huracán STO by 276 and 173, respectively.
When you factor in that the Temerario ought to undercut the STO's 2.6-second sprint to 60 mph by a few tenths and eventually top out at over 210 mph, the screaming V-8 engine and three electric drive motors just might have the right combination of personality and power to help us move past the V-10's death.
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