When Lamborghini Built an All-Electric Cargo Van, and Then Buried It
Here’s the official narrative: Lamborghini resisted the push to electrification better than any manufacturer in the world, and finally bent the knee to hybrid vehicles with the limited production Sián FKP 37, then the Revuelto and Temerario in the mid-2020s. On the face of it, that’s more or less still accurate, but it doesn’t account even slightly for a buried project from decades ago that even Lambo itself was eager to forget. Over 30 years ago, Lamborghini was among the first to try its hand at building EVs. No, seriously, we’re not kidding.
Lambo in the ‘90s: A Precarious Position
Lamborghini was operating in a near-perpetual state of panic in the late 1980s and into the early ’90s. Chrysler had scooped up the struggling Italian automaker in 1987, and while the Diablo eventually arrived to replace the aging Countach, the sheer cost of development was astronomical.
There were a few famous side projects at Lambo to try and pad profits, namely the LM002 off-roader, itself the spawn of a failed army jeep prototype that competed in the same program that spawned the Humvee. Elsewhere, Lambo even tried its hand at offshore marine V12 powerplants, some as large as 9.3 liters and making upwards of 800 horsepower, with great performance but horrendous reliability — a real mixed bag outside the typical supercar fare.
What if we told you someone at Lamborghini practically looked straight into the future and managed to predict where the auto industry would be 20 or 30 years down the line? It wouldn’t be far off from the truth, because the cash-strapped supercar maker set out to create what can only be described as… an electric cargo van? It sounds like something we made up, but it was all too real.
Swapping V12s for Batteries
Lamborghini’s first foray into electrification began with a partnership with ENEL, the Italian national electricity board. Instead of hiring a more traditional industrial firm like Fiat or Iveco, the utility giant tapped the country’s second leading supercar maker to engineer an all-electric delivery vehicle to navigate tight Italian city centers. The pairing was unusual on a number of levels, a bit like a speed-dating setup that matched two polar opposites.
Yet Lamborghini indeed had someone on staff more than qualified to give ENEL exactly what it wanted: Engineering Director Mauro Forghieri. A lifelong resident of Modena, the child of a Ferrari employee, and a former Ferrari engineer in his own right, Forghieri earned notoriety as one of Italy’s greatest Formula One designers. His accolades in the sport included penning the Ferrari 158 that won the 1964 F1 world title—he also spearheaded the 312T that secured multiple championships for Niki Lauda in the 1970s.
Spurred on by Chrysler executive Lee Iacocca’s founding of a tech-forward offshoot called Lamborghini Engineering, Forghieri was initially hired to develop V12s for Lamborghini’s motorsport ventures, just as he had done with Ferrari. Yet, for a brief period in the early ’90s, Forghieri was given the unusual assignment of helping satisfy ENEL’s transport van request. Knowing that ’90s battery technology was primitive by modern standards, the results were still quite surprising.
The Lamborghini Ecovan: The Polar Opposite of a Diablo
For starters, Mauro Forghieri had to assemble a powertrain for Lamborghini’s bonkers cargo van. While concrete information on the drivetrain is limited, the electric motor was a unit with a maximum output of 30 kilowatts, but could cycle between 18 and 30 depending on the application.Because brushless motors were ultra-expensive and usually reserved for aerospacein those days, it’s reasonable to suspect it was a brushed DC traction motor, much like you’d find in a golf cart or a forklift.
The battery was equally primitive: a simple lead-acid pack unlikely to accommodate more than 15 to 20 kWh. Massive and heavy, lead-acid batteries of that size could easily exceed 1,000 lbs on their own. Forghieri’s team also experimented with cutting-edge sodium-sulfur cells that were three times as energy-dense but operated at an extreme 300 to 350°C (572 to 662°F).
To keep weight down, the body was made of fiberglass-foam composite panels. Unladen, the van would’ve weighed under 1,300 kg (2,866 lbs) with a payload between 500 and 800 kg (1,102–1,763 lbs). Range was predictably poor, around 40 miles with lead-acid cells and up to about 75 with sodium-sulfurs. Lamborghini also experimented with early battery-swapping technology by sliding the cells out with rollers from the side or the rear. Had the program gone through, ENEL hoped to complete a production run of 100 units to use as laboratories for battery tech just as much as delivery vehicles. Of course, you can probably guess what happened.
A Great Idea, Way Too Soon
Surprisingly, the Ecovan project, or the EV1 as it was known internally (no, we’re not kidding), wasn’t canned because it’s antithetical to Lamborghini’s entire business model. Instead, it came down to cost and a significant degree of corporate restructuring. Chrysler wound up selling Lamborghini to an Indonesian firm called Megatech Ltd. in 1994, who in turn sold it to Audi in 1998.
The resulting corporate shuffle, paired with the absurd cost of EV components in the day, rendered the Ecovan program financially unviable. In total, only five were ever built, and none survive today. With that said, the Ecovan is proof that Lamborghini didn’t resist the EV movement as ferociously as most give it credit for. With the right set of circumstances, they could be persuaded. Their modern PHEVs and hybrids are, after all, genuinely impressive.
Source: Opposite Lock, Lamborghini
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