Lamborghini has just announced they’ve decided to call it quits on their much-ballyhooed Estoque high performance sedan. It was to be Lambo’s answer to Porsche’s Panamera as well as Maserati’s Quattroporte, or was it all just vaporware?
Look, I got nothing against practicality. You have to go get groceries and pick up three friends from the airport, that sort of practicality. Sadly, life cannot all be Ferrari Enzos and Caterham 7s. But I sort of have to draw the line with stuff like the Porsche Panamera. To me, that car, in addition to being misshapen and not very well executed, was just another sign of Porsche falling more and more out of consideration as a Serious Car Maker. First that God-awful and pointless Cayenne aimed at the Carmella Sopranos of the world, and now a fracking four door. What’s next guys, a sub-compact city car with a 2 cylinder engine?
So when the Estoque (that’s pronounce es-TOKE-ay, for you non-Iberians out there) hit the show stands, it gave me a queasy feeling more than anything else. Sure, the thought of me and three friends blasting from Milan to Paris in Lambo’s big, brutish sedan, DOES have a certain charm, but isn’t that what a Quattroporte is for? Or an S-Class?
Yeah, it’s nice to see Lambo get their beak wet in this area, stretch out a bit, see what else they can do (as well as raid some sedan expertise from company parent Audi), but overall it struck me as an odd thing for them to be doing. A lot of friends said that they thought it was vaporware from the get go, little more than an attention-getter from a company facing harsh economic times with a product line up that’s pretty much a textbook definition of the word “frivolous”.
So maybe it IS mission accomplished for the Lamborghini Estoque. Roll it out, get some press, and then say you decided to kill a car that was never going to see production.
Here is the full (if brief) Lambo press release:
23/03/2009 LAMBORGHINI ESTOQUE
In reference to recent press coverage commenting on cancellation of its Estoque project, Lamborghini has not taken any decision to produce its Estoque concept car, the four door performance saloon concept shown at Paris motor show in 2008.
As stated when the car was shown, Lamborghini believes that if a third model line should ever be added to its product line up, a four door luxury performance saloon could be a logical product strategy. No decision has been made to produce the Estoque.
Photo from Flickr user Wyemji
