Hollis Johnson/Business Insider
The 2019 Lamborghini Urus.
- The Lamborghini Urus is, according to the Italian automaker, the world's first "super-sport utility vehicle."
- Our tester cost $250,000, it was well-optioned, and was outfitted in a bonkers yellow paint job. In other words, it was very much a Lamborghini.
- The Urus is, however, surprisingly versatile.
- In the end, I decided that Lamborghini did a fantastic job with a design that would have been easy to screw up.
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Editor's note: Business Insider will name its 2019 Car of the Year on November 23. Each day this week, we're taking another look at the five vehicles that were runners-up selected from a pool of 16 finalists. The first vehicle is the 2019 Lamborghini Urus.
For decades, the names Ferrari and Lamborghini meant sexy, sleek, powerful Italian sports cars - supercars, and later, hypercars. Expensive dream machines.
Of course, the business model for cars that start at $200,000 and keep going until you hit a million or more is ... limited. Until recently, Ferrari built only about 7,000 road cars per year. Lamborghini built fewer than that.
In this day and age, it made no sense for Lambo to do a grand tourer or a sedan, so instead, we got a "super sport utility vehicle" - a Lambofied SUV that was announced a few years back. But would it be a real Lamborghini? On that score I assumed physics would mitigate that Lambo fizz.
I might have been wrong. Read on to find out why - as well as why the Lamborghini Urus is a 2019 Car of the Year runner-up:
Photos by Hollis Johnson.