How the Urus is Helping Lamborghini Thrive During Tough Times for the Industry

It’s strange to think now that the Lamborghini Urus is so ubiquitous, but when it launched in 2018, it was something of an unknown quantity. While cars like the Porsche Cayenne and Bentley Bentayga had already proven there was an appetite for fast SUVs with prestigious badges, companies whose main business was what the industry groups together as ‘super sports cars’ largely steered clear. 

It would be another two years after the Urus before we got the Aston Martin DBX, five before the Ferrari Purosangue arrived, and McLaren’s long-mooted, all-but-confirmed SUV is still yet to surface, so the Lambo was rather testing the waters in this potentially huge untapped market.

That potential was very quickly realised. Just over four years after its launch, Lamborghini had already built its 20,000th Urus, and while it no longer breaks down its sales by model, it’s more than likely that figure has since doubled. There’s little question that the in-yer-face SUV was the major driver behind the company shifting a record-breaking 10,747 cars in 2025.

At the Goodwood Festival of Speed, where the model’s latest iteration, the 801bhp, plug-in hybrid Urus SE Performante, was making its public debut, we sat down with Stefano Cossalter, Lamborghini’s product line director for the Urus, who revealed that even he was a little surprised by quite how successful it was.

“The Urus completely changed the dimension of Lamborghini,” Stefano says. “When we started, the company was running on two cars, both of them super sports cars [then the Aventador and Huracan]. That market was a little bit weak, and the company was suffering. The idea was really to create a third model with completely different positioning, catching a spot where nobody else was.

“It paid out big time. The Urus has an 80 per cent conquer rate, which means that 80 per cent of customers are new to the company.” This, he says, has led to plenty of these customers branching out into purchases of the brand’s sports cars too.

Obviously, Lambo had a headstart as a part of the sprawling Volkswagen Group. Unlike its largely bespoke supercars, the opportunity was there for a higher-volume car like the Urus to make use of plenty of existing VW Group hardware, but did that pose a challenge in ensuring it still felt distinctively Lambo-ish?

“Yes,” Stefano tells us, matter-of-factly. “But we worked on all the items, specifically the driving dynamics. Everything that is linked to a feeling of being a Lamborghini, of driving fast like a Lamborghini, is done by us.”

That’s something that’s only become trickier in the eight years since the Urus launched, as regulations around high-performance petrol cars have not only generally tightened but diverged massively in different parts of the world. For its part, Lambo has hedged its bets on plug-in hybrids in the short run, not just with the Urus, which went PHEV-only in 2024, but for its entire range.

This has allowed the company, for now, to stick with the big-capacity petrol engines that are its heart and soul, but it unsurprisingly brings its own problems. “Of course, you have the drawback of weight… A 25kWh battery weighs about 300kg.” Even shedding 32kg over the standard hybrid Urus SE, the Performante still has a titanic 2,473kg kerbweight.

The answer, unsurprisingly, is software. The Performante features a 6D sensor, a module that measures longitudinal, latitudinal and vertical movement as well as pitch, yaw and roll. It then works with the car’s brain to help it respond faster to these movements, keeping it flatter and allowing the driver to brake later.

It’s something we’ll have to try first hand to really feel the effects of, but a passenger ride up the Goodwood hill with one of Lambo’s suitably unhinged development drivers confirms that the Performante corners remarkably flat and is more than capable of hanging its tail out like an overgrown rally car. The late braking ability is more than apparent too, although you’re very aware of quite how hard the gigantic carbon ceramic brakes – 440mm discs on the front and 410mm at the back – are having to fight the laws of physics to slow two and a half tonnes of hurtling SUV.

It would be easy to assume that with a car as wildly successful as the Urus, the good times will never end. Indeed, with a number of governments backing off the phaseout of internal combustion engines to various degrees, there’s no sign that it’ll be going anywhere soon – not if people keep buying it at the rate they are. Stefano reiterates Lambo’s confirmation in late 2024 that development of an Urus replacement is underway and that it’ll arrive by the end of the decade, complete with a similar V8 PHEV powertrain to the current car.

But even Lamborghini can’t ignore the long-term prevailing direction the industry is going in. The current weak demand for luxury EVs led to the company repositioning the Lanzador, its first planned electric car, as another PHEV instead, but background development work continues on things like battery cells and chemistries for full EVs because.

“Sooner or later, an electric car will be in our portfolio,” says Stefano, and if any of the company’s current range will be the first domino to fall, the SUV seems like the obvious choice ahead of the supercars. “But for the moment, we’re happy with the hybridisation.”

It’s easy to see why. At a particularly tough moment for the car industry at all ends of the market, Lamborghini is defying the prevailing conditions, and it mostly has the Urus to thank. Worth considering next time you see one being clogged down Knightsbridge in second gear.