Lamborghini prophesizes 'Terzo Millennio'

Stupefying new concept car electrified by MIT's input

You'd rather expect a collaboration between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (famous for producing Nobel laureates) and Lamborghini (famous for producing tractors) to pay off with something outrageously exotic - and the first fruits of their labour don't disappoint.

The 'Terzo Millennio', as the name suggests, is not a concept which has time for its contemporaries' turgid pigeon steps toward electrification. But instead takes a hugely ambitious, and knowingly speculative, leap toward some of the engineering possibilities that may await two or three generations ahead.

Consequently, while it may have four fairly recognisable electric motors - one housed in each wheel for the betterment of the car's aerodynamic design - they would not be driven by anything as mundane as conventional batteries. Instead, the engineers envisage super capacitors powering the show; their virtue being tremendously higher output, alongside much faster charging and the durability to accept many more recharge cycles before degrading.

The neat trick here of course is that super capacitors are already familiar from many other industrial applications - not least the low-voltage kind which are used by a number of car manufacturers to power start-stop systems, where a burst of energy is needed in a very short space of time - but they currently lack the kind of density (and affordability) which makes lithium-ion such an appealing slow-burner as a power source.

Overcoming this limitation is one pillar of the research project. Another is 'innovation in materials' and here Lamborghini makes an even deeper thrust into the unknown by, "using structural electric energy storing composites as a rechargeable battery". This basically involves developing nanomaterial technology to the point where the carbon fibre body panels themselves would be made to do the job of today's battery cells.

And if that's not sufficiently Borg meets Red Dwarf for you, the project also imagines the same system of diffuse nano-charges also continuously monitoring the car's structure; detecting any damage that may occur after an accident, "while limiting or reducing to zero the risks correlated to the presence and propagation of cracks in the carbon fibre structure"- a sentence which suggests an hitherto unimagined capacity for self-healing.

Finally - and possibly to prove that Lamborghini hasn't forgotten what really matters to its clientele - the partnership will study what soundtrack a future model ought to produce; insisting that a "deep investigation is needed" into how they might go about replacing the melody of a V12 engine. That's probably more up Sant'Agata Bolognese's street than MIT's - although solving it would likely be just as welcome in the third millennium as the remainder of the Terzo Millennio's hypothesising.

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