Outlandish aesthetics, a naturally aspirated V12 and mind boggling speed, the Lamborghini Aventador S is every inch a supercar
“Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.” Dylan Thomas wasn’t writing about the impending demise of the internal combustion engine, but the Lamborghini Aventador S is the automotive embodiment of his sentiment. This is not a car, not a manufacturer, that is accepting the death penalty imposed on engines such as its masterful V12 on anything but its own terms. Slide away quietly? No chance. Nothing assaults the senses quite like it.
The Lamborghini Aventador S is something of a supercar checklist. The looks are unlike anything else on the road. It has presence in spades thanks to its wide gait and low ride height. It’s stunningly impractical. It’s blindingly fast. The engine, oh the engine, is a masterpiece. A 6.5-litre naturally aspirated V12, its symphony is enough to justify this car on its own.
It doesn’t just sound great, though. 730bhp is sufficient to tick off 0-60mph in 2.8secs. It’ll reach 100mph faster than most sports cars will hit 60. Plant the right foot at any speed and the acceleration is exhilarating. The V12 bursts into life with an almighty roar before kicking you down the road at the speed of light. It’s not something you’d ever get bored of doing. This isn’t a car you’d ever get bored of. Annoyed at? From time to time. Bored of? Never.
What’s the Lamborghini Aventador S like to drive?
Not every stretch of road facilitates the sweet song of the Lamborghini Aventador S. I was thrown in at the deep end. Collecting the car from Lamborghini’s servicing centre in North Acton, my first experience was crawling through west London traffic to Richmond. There’s no getting away from the fact that this is a big, imposing car. Visibility out of it isn’t amazing for urban conditions. The blind spots are massive, leaving you to say a few prayers when changing lane.
It’s a remarkable car. The acceleration is brutal and threading it along a decent B-road reveals extraordinary poise and traction. There’s zero body roll and oodles of grip. You really don’t have to be a brilliant driver to simply enjoy the Lamborghini Aventador S. The power is mind boggling and you absolutely have to be a brilliant driver to explore the limits of this car, but enjoying it is easy.
The steering is sharp and precise, with the wheel constantly alive in your hands. You get a good feel for the engine through your right foot and the pedals are brilliant to modulate. Each centimetre of carry draws a response from both accelerator and brakes. Whilst the single clutch gearbox can’t really compete with others in terms of sophistication, it undoubtedly adds to the drama and is responsive to your requests. There’s something visceral about the neck snapping shifts that keeps you coming back for more.
The four-wheel drive and four-wheel steering setup add agility to the mix. With that V12 sitting behind you and the car alive in your hands, it’s an all-consuming, exhausting experience in the most wonderful of ways.
So, what are the drawbacks to the Lamborghini Aventador S?
As mentioned, the fuel consumption is wild. There’s no cylinder deactivation. You’ll also wake up everyone on your street when you start it up first thing. But, if you can afford one, you probably don’t live on a street.
The pedals are too far over to the left. The accelerator is where the brake should be and the brake where a clutch would go in a manual. There’s no storage space in the car and nowhere to rest your right arm when driving. Infotainment isn’t a strong point, either, with no touchscreen, no high-res and an awfully fiddly system to navigate. Bizarrely, it has an excellent stereo, but it’s so loud in the cabin that you can’t hear its detail. At night, the light that illuminates the door handles is so bright that you can’t see anything else other than it. I had to put my coat over it or ask the passenger to sit in such a way that they obstructed it. The seatbelts can’t be adjusted and they’re too low for anyone over 5ft tall, so they slip off all the time.
But you know what? I don’t care. No one cares. Who on earth buys a Lamborghini Aventador S on the strength of the infotainment and how practical it is? Not a single soul. A quick squeeze of the right foot, the rumble of the V12 and the fact you’ll be at the horizon in just a moment fades all of this into insignificance.
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The Lamborghini Aventador S is an intoxicating machine. It’s laser focussed on performance to the point that it might just be more substance than style. And there isn’t exactly a shortage of style here. Nothing I’ve driven has turned heads quite like it. People wanted photos beside it at petrol stations (there were a lot of petrol stations) and people were snapping photos on the motorway. The appeal is unquestionable.
It looks the part and is every inch a supercar. There’s an outlandish, almost mythical presence to it. Yet it’s surprisingly pliant, too. You can get over speedbumps and park it easily. I really wasn’t expecting it to be so accessible. Ingress and egress are also easier than anticipated via the scissor doors.
It’s impossible not to get drawn in by the Lamborghini Aventador S. From the first moment you lock eyes on it, to every time you flick open the starter switch and eagerly anticipate the start-up of that naturally aspirated V12, this is a special car. It’s wasted crawling round central London but find an open road and it makes your soul sing. The engine is superb, then there’s the handling and the steering. Aesthetically its entirely unique.
You have to find the right conditions for it, rather than it bending itself to your will, but do that and it’s such a rewarding car. There’s a wonderful throwback element to the whole experience. It requires fierce concentration and complete driver involvement. Naturally aspirated V12s, too, won’t be around for much longer. If this is the endgame for such engines, the Lamborghini Aventador S is raging against the dying of the light.
Need a special gift for your mom for her birthday? Try giving her a ride in a 759-horsepower Lamborghini.
One of the principal tenants of Gear Patrol is that the right product can serve and enrich people’s lives. But to do that, you have to find the right product for the task — or the right task for the product.
I bring this up because the Lamborghini Aventador SVJ is, admittedly, very rarely going to be the ideal product for whatever the task at hand. It’s a car that costs as much as a mansion. It’s so wide that parking feels dangerous — those scissor doors aren’t for show, they’re so you don’t ding adjacent vehicles half a block away — yet the interior is as cramped as the cockpit of the fighter jets it looks like it wants to be. It rides low enough that it’ll scrape over rocks the size of squirrel boogers. Its mighty V12 vents heat as prolifically and consistently as Old Faithful, blurring what little backwards visibility you have in a haze.
The list of tasks and people for whom the Aventador SVJ is the perfect product for the job is, as a result, fairly short. If you’re looking to lap the famous 12.9-mile German racetrack called the Nurburgring Nordschleife faster than any other production car, it’s the right machine for the task. If you’re a billionaire Gotham City crimefighter looking for a car to bridge the gap between his diurnal and nocturnal rides, you couldn’t do better.
And, as it turns, it’s the perfect car to surprise someone with a birthday ride.
My mother, who lives in Vermont, insists upon but one gift for her birthday every year: for me to visit and take her out to dinner at her favorite restaurant in a surprise cool car. With each passing year, however, she’s insisted upon something more exciting than the year before; given that 2016’s visit involved a BMW Z4, 2017’s pop-in came in a Chevy Corvette Grand Sport and 2018’s birthday revolved around a Mercedes-AMG GT C, this year requires something in the supercar category in order to raise the bar yet again. Hence: this half-million-dollar-plus Lamborghini.
The fact that this gives me an opportunity to cane a 759-horsepower supercar on some of New York and Vermont’s most bucolic roads? Naprosto náhoda.
Getting to those roads, however, involves bobbing, weaving, and crawling along the worst of New York City’s streets. The Lambo isn’t happy in the city; driving it along the avenues and side streets feels like walking a tiger on a leash. Every pothole sends a crash through the carbon-fiber body, in spite of the best efforts of the magnetorheological dampers. Those brass-colored rims wear just enough tire to grip the road; any additional sidewall would hurt the handling, which means there’s almost none to soak up any imperfections in the city’s very imperfect pavement. Traffic, thankfully, gives it a wide berth, no doubt scared off by the feral face, Grigio Telesto paint job and the spoiler large enough to be pulled off a Boeing.
Once out of the city, the Raging Bull starts to come into its own. The Taconic Parkway that winds north from the Bronx to the edge of Albany is so narrow, the Lamborghini’s 83 inches of width seems to suck up every micron of the lane — which is particularly jarring when there’s a rock wall on one side of you and a Chevy Suburban on the other. Still, if you can’t move from side to side, you can always move forwards or back. The brakes take a little getting used to, thanks to a dash of softness at the top of the travel, but once they bite, they do it like a great white shark; this Lamborghini will stop from 60 miles per hour in less than 100 feet, which means bopping back to find a gap is breathtakingly easy.
Or, of course, you could try and pass that annoying car alongside you. Well, not vyzkoušet; vy umět pass that car alongside you, pretty much no matter what it is or how fast it’s going. Snap the long paddle protruding to the left of the steering wheel once or twice to drop the seven-speed gearbox down a cog or two to put the 6.5-liter engine into the sweet spot of its power band, and the gas pedal becomes the trigger on a catapult, launching you forward with what feels like the sort of force usually reserved for NASA employees and Navy pilots. But while you come for the thrust, you stay for the sound: the scream flowing from those 12 cylinders as they pump faster and faster qualifies as a religious experience for gearheads.
As the miles go on, the Lambo’s secrets start to reveal themselves. The drive mode selector is best toggled to the ever-so-appropriate Ego mode, which lets you personalize the suspension, engine and steering setting: Corsa (the raciest) is best for the steering, as it locks the rack’s ratio (it’s variable in the other modes); Strada (the most relaxed) is ideal for the suspension, as you’ll want every dram of compliance you can steal here; and Sport (the intermediate) is best for the throttle, because it frees up the throttle and exhaust without being quite as grating as angry Corsa. The cabin — which seemed surprisingly accommodating for my six-foot-four-inch frame at first — proves too cramped for more than a couple hours of seat time without stopping to stretch; I climb out limping more than once, my legs cramping up from the seat bolsters pushing incessantly into my thighs.
Above all else, though, every quiet country bend and empty rural route reveals how stunningly, stupefyingly delightful this Lambo is to drive. The SVJ is the second car to benefit from Lamborghini’s miraculous air-vectoring “Aerodinamica Lamborghini Attiva” system, which shunts the air rushing past about to adjust the car’s aerodynamics. It even helps the car turn faster, blocking airflow on one side or another in a manner not unlike dragging a kayak’s paddle in the water helps it turn. A display on the instrument panel lets you see when it’s working…though at the speeds where it works, you probably ought to be staring at the road.
What matters is that it gives this massive car the sort of agility you wouldn’t normally associate with something of its size. Combined with the razor-sharp steering rack and the rear-wheel steering, the SVJ feels nimble as a new Supra when you push it.
And while the car’s speed is apparent even on fast-moving highways, it’s only once you find a clear stretch of road that you can really experience it. The naturally-aspirated V12 pulls hard no matter what speed it’s turning at, with the power rising and rising all the way to its 8,500 rpm peak — just 200 rpm shy of redline. You barely touch those last thousand rpm in the real world; partly because the engine spins up so fast that you don’t want to slap against the rev limiter, but more because, well, you never need that last burst. It’s just so damn fast.
The end result is a car that feels like it could beat nic on a winding road. An old ad for the Ford GT comes to mind: In what gear do you know that nothing can catch you? It’s not hard to see how this Lambo could beat all production car comers at the Nurburgring; that track is effectively the ultimate winding road, one that just happens to be behind some tall fencing.
Would I buy it, if I had the $518K-plus needed to park this wild machine in my garage? I never would have thought so before this, but yeah. In part, because it is as capable as those looks lead you to believe; it can cash the checks its design writes. But more because, well…it’s just plain fun.
Not just in the traditional sense espoused by the likes of your Miatas and M3s, although there’s more of that than you’d expect. Not just because you drive it knowing it may well be the last of the cruel old Lamborghinis, the final installment in a raw, guttural line stretching back to that first obscene Countach of nearly 50 years ago. The Aventador’s replacement, should there be one — hardly a given — will, at the very least, presumably have its V12 fury tempered by hybrid technology and a dual-clutch transmission, if not see that 12-cylinder engine swapped for one with eight or 10 pistons like the sorts found in the Urus and Huracan.
But the most entertaining part of the Aventador SVJ isn’t how much fun it is to manhandle down a winding road or crack through traffic. It’s the reactions you get from everyone else around you. To borrow a pop culture reference from a little while back, it Marie Kondo-es the road: the Aventador SVJ sparks joy wherever it goes. Nothing makes people stop and stare like a Lamborghini. That’s doubly true for a scissor-winged V12 bull like the Aventador, and triply true for this bewinged badass. It’s like the SVJ taps into some primal genetic memory of what a sports car is. Stop for gas (a frequent occurrence), and people wander over to ask questions. Passengers (and occasionally drivers) of other cars whip out phones to take pictures as you flash by. Crowds spontaneously form around it wherever it’s parked. I chase a motorcyclist down a back road for a few miles; when he turns off ahead of me at the end of it, he throws his fist in the air like Judd Nelson at the end of Snídaňový klub.
At the end of the journey, I pull up in front of my mother, and she starts laughing uncontrollably, as though she’s doing an impromptu Joker impression.
“Okay, this is pretty cool,” she says as she drops into the passenger’s seat. She drops an expletive or two in there, as well.
So how am I going to top this with an even faster, wilder car? Thankfully, I don’t need to. Mom says she wants to go off-roading in a Jeep Gladiator next year.
2019 Lamborghini Aventador SVJ: Key Specs
Základní cena (testovaná cena): $ 517,770 ($ 583,470)
Hnací ústrojí: 6.5-liter V12; seven-speed sequential manual gearbox; all-wheel-drive
Výkon: 759
Točivý moment: 531 lb-ft
0-60 MPH: 2.5 sekund (Trend motoru testování)
Nejvyšší rychlost: The scary side of 217 mph
Lamborghini provided this product for review.
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