Currently reading: Frankfurt show: Lambo's jet fighter
Meet the Reventon, the LP640 that's been crossed with an F22 - and they're building it

This is the Lamborghini Reventon, unveiled today (11 September) at the Frankfurt motor show. It’s not quite a concept car – the Reventon will head from Frankfurt to a very limited clientele – but it’s still not quite a real production car, either. At a neat one million euros before tax, or around £675,000 plus tax, the Reventon will be not only the most expensive car at the Frankfurt motor show, but the rarest as well. Lamborghini will build only 20 Reventons and they have already been snapped up. Only one has been allocated to the UK.The Reventon is named after a Mexican bull that killed a toreador in 1943. It is described by Lamborghini as an art-house Murcielago LP640 inspired by the F22 jet (a state-of-the-art fighter built by Lockheed Martin), and was designed, developed and built exclusively within Lamborghini’s Centro Stile in Italy. Its only mechanical difference to the LP640 is a blue-printed version of the 6.5-litre all-alloy V12 to develop 650bhp at 8000rpm. Instead of extra speed, the car has been used as a trial run for new technology and new design-to-production systems.While the forward-leaning, arrowed look of the carbonfibre body (just the roof and doors remain in aluminium) shares only its mirrors with the LP640, it is the interior that commands attention.Lamborghini has patents pending on its all-new Thin Film Treatment (TFT) liquid-crystal display, and if parts of the cabin might look familiar, the sum of its parts is entirely new. The digital dash gives drivers the choice of a round, analogue speedo and tacho or a more radical jet fighter-inspired solution. In a radical departure from the automotive norm, the alternate display has no tacho or speedo needles. Instead, it uses a pair of converging lines to make a digitized landing strip (not dissimilar in shape to the indicator lines on a Lexus's reversing camera) to mark out the tacho and speedo numbers. Then there’s a wing-style indicator in each path that moves up and down with revs and speed.“We’ve developed the dash on our own by brainstorming. We only went outside to get it done once we’d figured it all out,” Lamborghini director of brand and design, Manfred Fitzgerald said, proudly.“Everyone is looking in the same dash direction as we’ve taken, but they’re looking in the old style. I don’t want to take the path that has been walked already.”The other key to the Reventon's development has been the leap straight from the designer’s pen to production.It is the first Lamborghini to go directly from sketches to CAD to production in a process that will be emulated on future programs.“It has all been virtual and CAD and the first prototype is actually the first car. There was no 1:1; no clay. We did a quarter-scale model just to verify it in the wind tunnel, but that’s all. It allowed us to reduce production times tremendously,” said Fitzgerald.

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