Lamborghini of the Terzo Millennio writes an important page in the future of electric super sports cars.
The Terzo Millennio embodies the first steps for Lamborghini to go in the direction of creating a “Lamborghini Electric”.
The strategy of creating super sports cars with uncompromising performance generates Lamborghini’s motivation to revolutionize the approach to energy storage, moving away from conventional batteries and investigating the potential of supercapacitors to equip the Terzo Millennio.
Lamborghini is addressing the future of the super sports car with the aid of Massachusetts Institute Of Technology. Automobili
Lamborghini in collaboration with two laboratories of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology marks the first steps of a possible future Lamborghini electric super sports car.
The technological goal of the Lamborghini of the Terzo Millennio project is to envision the automotive future in five different
dimensions: energy storage systems, innovative materials, propulsion system, visionary design, and emotion.
The first two dimensions are conceived together with the two laboratories at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology: the “Dinca Research Lab”, led by Prof. Mircea Dinca, Department of Chemistry and the “Mechanosynthesis Group”, led by Prof. Anastasios John Hart, Department of Mechanical Engineering. The collaboration is substantially financed by Automobili Lamborghini and intended to lead to radical innovation in energy storage systems technology and material science.
Stefano Domenicali, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Automobili Lamborghini, says: “Exactly one year ago we have
signed an agreement with the MIT-Italy Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology which marked the start of a
collaboration between two outstanding entities for the creation of a project that intends to write an important page in the future of super sports cars for the third millennium.
Collaborating with MIT for our R&D department is an exceptional opportunity to do what Lamborghini has always been very good at: rewriting the rules on super sports cars. Now we are presenting an exciting and progressive concept car. We are inspired by embracing what is impossible today to craft the realities of tomorrow: Lamborghini must always create the dreams of the next generation.”
The cooperation with Prof. John Hart will investigate the new manufacturing routes for carbon fiber materials constituting the
bodyshell of the Terzo Millennio, which will also act as an accumulator for energy storage and enable the complete body of the car to be used as a storage system.
The project also aims to combine the technology to continuously monitor the whole carbon fiber structure, both visible and invisible, with the concept of “self-healing”: the target is to provide the Terzo Millennio with the ability to conduct its own health monitoring to detect cracks and damages in its substructure derived from accidents. In this case a self-repairing process starts via micro- channels filled with healing chemistries, reducing to zero the risks of small cracks propagating further in the carbon fiber structure.
This allows further weight reduction with increased use of carbon fiber or the application of CFK to high-fatigueparts.
Propulsion System
The energy storage system goes hand-in hand with performance: each wheel incorporates an integrated electric engine, perpetuating the commitment to four-wheel drive and in the meantime harvesting the opportunities provided by electric motors: high torque, reversibility, and the possibility of moving energy by wire.
The Terzo Millenio’s virtual cockpit allows more than travelling the highways of a future world: its Piloted Driving simulation allows the driver to be taken around a track such as Imola by a virtual expert before the driver takes over to feel like a ‘pilot’ himself, experiencing the real car and circuit while following the virtual ghost car.
