Hybrid cars don’t have to be boring

A couple of very different new cars revealed last week have put a positive spin on electrification for anyone who still loves the smell of petrol in the morning. 

A new Lamborghini is always a special occasion for those who had supercars on their bedroom walls (the Countach was my childhood poster of choice), and deploying plug-in hybrid power alongside a petrol V8 to take it over 900hp makes the Temerario an enticing proposition. 

As usual for Lamborghini, its latest beast has a name that will only really sound right when said by an Italian, and I love that the first translation that popped up on a popular internet search site was “reckless”. “Daredevil” was further down the page, and I’d imagine is more what Lamborghini was going for, but the Temerario looks like a ‘proper’ supercar, and the figures back it up. Using three electric motors to boost its performance by over 100bhp is the kind of electrification car lovers can get behind. 

And I’m always a big fan of super-fast practical cars, so a new BMW M5 Touring is well overdue. In fact it’s almost a decade and a half since the last 5 Series super-estate, and this new 700bhp model is immediately installed at the top of my one-car-to-do-everything Christmas list. 

It’s about time BMW returned to the arena that the Audi RS 6 and Mercedes-AMG E-Class Estate have long populated. As one esteemed colleague eloquently put it, “Audi and AMG are no longer the only estates to scare the cr*p out of your dog”. That’s a lovely image, I’m sure you’ll agree, but there’s something so very appealing about fast cars that will also do the boring family car stuff.

It will be interesting to see what the extra weight of a plug-in hybrid powertrain does to cars that need a driving experience to match their looks – cars that need to do much more than be brutally fast in a straight line. 

But it’s good to see clever people are finding ways to deploy the latest technology to ensure we still have models that get pulses racing, and keep people enthused about performance vehicles.

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