As reported on Wired.
BY DAMON LAVRINC
The crew from Sant’Agata has lost its collective mind. There’s no other explanation for the Lamborghini Egoist concept.
Only Lamborghini, a company that has no interest whatsoever in subtlety, could, and would, name a car “The Egoist.” This rolling compensator is a single-seat, four-wheeled birthday present to itself in honor of its 50th anniversary. Start racking up the decades and odd things can happen to your mental faculties. This is 600 horsepower worth of proof.
“It is designed purely for hyper-sophisticated people who want only the most extreme and special things in the world. It represents hedonism taken to the extreme, it is a car without compromises, in a word: egoista,” said Walter De Silva, the VW Group’s head of design, at a private unveiling in Italy.
Mr. De Silva: “Extreme” is putting it incredibly lightly, and as a reminder, “egoist” roughly translates to “selfish.”
This car is a mashup of Speed Racer’s Mach5, a Matchbox car and Apache helicopter. It’s the sort of thing you see scribbled in the margins of a 10-year-old’s math homework. Words fail to describe the complete and utter insanity of this maniacal mishmash of angles and creases, stuffed with a 5.2-liter V10. It’s the road-going equivalent of a cheetah on roller skates with a ballistic missile strapped to its back.
As insane as this car is on the outside, the utter lack of constraints – and taste – is cranked to 11 once you open the, er, door.
Somewhere among the eye-popping orange leather and obligatory carbon fiber is what you might charitably describe as a steering wheel. Beyond that lies an angular instrument panel with an octagon-shaped head-up display pulled from a fighter jet. Yes, a fighter jet. It’s part of a theme, you see. According to Lamborghini, for the driver to extricate himself from the cockpit, he must first remove the steering wheel, open the orange-hued dome, then oh-so-carefully “sit down on a precise point of the left-hand bodywork, then swivel their legs 180 degrees from the inside of the cockpit to the outside of the vehicle.”
But as insufferably psychotic as the Egoist is, we can’t help but think this is what’s been missing from the world of supercars. It’s wholly insane, impractical to a fault and so completely preposterous that it revels in its own decadence and depravity. Frankly, that’s just what a supercar should do. And depending on your perversions, it’s either a blessing or a curse that the Egoist will never be seen beyond the walls of Lamborghini’s museum.