There can be few better places for manufacturers to meet super-rich potential customers than Villa d'Este, the concours event that takes place this weekend at a distinctly uncheap hotel on the shore of Lake Como.
Which is presumably why Lamborghini is using it as an excuse to give the hybrid Asterion LPI 910-4 another outing, by entering it for the Award for concept cars and prototypes. We first saw the Asterion at last year's Paris motor show, where it represented a genuine surprise against expectations that Lambo would do what it usually does these days and just show a 'limited to three' megacar in pretty colours.
Reserved, conservative styling ... hybrid? Eek!
The Asterion combines a naturally aspirated mid-mounted 610hp V10 engine with a chunky battery pack and three electric motors to deliver a combined peak output of 910hp plus an electric only range of 30 miles. That last figure is being adopted by enough manufacturers as a benchmark you can expect it to be adopted as a European standard for defining electric cars when urban Zero Emissions Zones start to spread. Officially it can do 0-62mph in three seconds and has a top speed of 199mph; both figures that cast a modicum of doubt over how close it would ever get to its official 98g/km CO2 rating if released into the wild.
The official line from Sant'Agata remains that the Asterion is only a technology demonstrator, with the company acknowledging that - like almost everybody else - it will have plug-in hybrid models in its future. But it certainly looks production viable to us; and a better idea than the Urus SUV.
Watch the press video from Paris 2014 here.