Lamborghini Egoista: A Singular Ride

To mark its 50th anniversary, Lamborghini unveiled an outrageous one-off concept called the Egoista.This is what 600bhp worth of selfishness and celebration wrapped up in aluminium, carbon fibre and anti-radar material looks like. Welcome everyone, to Lamborghini, and the new Egoista concept car.

It is the offspring of VW Group design chief Walter De Silva, built especially for Lamborghini’s 50th anniversary and unveiled on the final day of the awe-inspiring Grande Giro tour through Italy (which you can follow up on TopGear.com shortly). Put simply, it is a car made purely for ego. Says De Silva: “It represents hedonism taken to the extreme. It is a car without compromises.”

Quite. Underneath sits a very modified version of the 5.2-litre V10 from the Gallardo, here tweaked to produce 600bhp, sitting underneath a simply bonkers exterior styled using inspiration from an Apache helicopter. The cockpit can even be ejected in an emergency, if you so wish. Typical Lamborghini, then.

De Silva and his design team wanted Lamborghini’s famous icon to shine through the design, so the side flanks are there to represent a ‘bull preparing to charge, horns lowered’. There’s no aero on top, but flaps in the bodywork that flip open or closed automatically depending on driving conditions. There are two at the back to increase stability, and a series of intakes on the back of the engine hood to increase cooling for the V10.

There are LED clearance lights at the front in place of traditional headlights, ‘bull’s eyes’ orange side indicators, red rear lights and two more lights on the roof, with two ‘eagle eyes’ hidden in the front intakes; these are used to ‘scan the darkness for great distances’. Any intelligent aliens roaming our galaxy may mistake this Egoista in the dark as one of their own.

As mentioned, that body is made up of carbon fibre and aluminium, using aeronautical-spec antiradar material, and anti-glare glass too. Inside, there’s just a single racing seat with a four-point seatbelt, and a head-up display and steering wheel formed after longingly looking at pictures of jet fighters. And the entrance too is similarly Top Gun: there isn’t a door, but a domed roof that flips open, meaning the driver must stand up in his or her seat, swivel their legs over and literally jump out. Maverick? You had better hope so.