Foschini Frames the Revuelto as a Statement of Intent
Federico Foschini, Lamborghini’s Chief Marketing and Sales Officer, used a recent series of short films to articulate something more pointed than a typical product walkthrough. His subject: the Revuelto, the company’s first V12 plug-in hybrid, and the strategic reasoning that shaped it. The films position the car as Lamborghini’s answer to a question every supercar manufacturer now faces. How do you electrify without erasing what made people care in the first place?
Foschini describes innovation as fundamental to the brand and positions the Revuelto as a continuation of that principle, not a concession to regulation. The car, he says, represents Lamborghini’s own interpretation of electrification, built around what the company calls fun-to-drive character and outright performance. According to Lamborghini, its DNA centers on those two qualities, and the Revuelto was engineered to amplify them rather than dilute them.
The most telling detail in Foschini’s commentary is a single acronym: HPEV, or High Performance Electrified Vehicle. Lamborghini coined the term specifically for the Revuelto, and it tells you everything about how Sant’Agata Bolognese wants this car, and its successors, understood. The label is a deliberate act of category creation, separating the Revuelto from the broader plug-in hybrid conversation and anchoring it to performance credibility. That insistence on a new vocabulary runs through every layer of the car’s engineering and marketing, and it is the thread that connects the Revuelto’s powertrain choices, its competitive positioning, and its implications for the brand’s future.
What ‘HPEV’ Actually Means, and Why Lamborghini Needed a New Label
The supercar industry already overflows with acronyms. PHEV, BEV, HEV. Lamborghini looked at those labels and decided none of them communicated what the Revuelto is supposed to be. A plug-in hybrid Prius and a plug-in hybrid Lamborghini share a technical classification on paper, and that is a branding problem Foschini’s team clearly wanted to solve before it started.
HPEV reframes the conversation. Instead of leading with the electrified part, the emphasis falls on high performance. The distinction matters because it signals Lamborghini’s engineering priority: the electric motors exist to make the V12 faster, more responsive, and more capable. They fill the low-end torque gaps that naturally aspirated engines leave open, smooth power delivery during gear changes, and provide instant thrust off the line. The battery and motors serve the combustion engine, not the other way around.
This philosophy stands in contrast to approaches where hybridization functions primarily as a compliance tool, with electric assistance bolted onto existing platforms to meet emissions targets while the power bump gets marketed as a secondary benefit. Lamborghini, at least in Foschini’s telling, started from the performance question first. The Revuelto’s hybrid architecture pairs its naturally aspirated 6.5-liter V12 with three electric motors, and the combined output of 1,001 horsepower reflects a system designed around extracting maximum capability from both power sources simultaneously.
Whether the HPEV label catches on beyond Lamborghini’s own marketing remains an open question. What it accomplishes internally is more concrete: it gives the sales team and the engineering team a shared vocabulary that keeps performance at the center of every conversation about the car.
Preserving the V12 in an Era That Wants to Kill It
The Revuelto replaces the Aventador, a car that defined Lamborghini’s flagship identity for over a decade with its screaming naturally aspirated V12 and a single-clutch gearbox that kicked you in the spine on every upshift. The Aventador was gloriously uncompromising, and that made its successor’s job extraordinarily difficult. How do you follow a car whose flaws were part of its charm?
Lamborghini’s answer was to keep the engine and modernize everything around it. The Revuelto’s 6.5-liter V12 is not a carryover unit; it is an entirely new naturally aspirated engine paired with an eight-speed dual-clutch transmission, replacing the Aventador’s famously aggressive single-clutch automated manual. The dual-clutch gearbox alone represents a seismic shift in how the flagship drives, and the addition of three electric motors transforms the power delivery curve into something the Aventador could never achieve.
The result is a car that accelerates from 0 to 100 km/h in 2.4 seconds and reaches a top speed of 354 km/h (217 mph). Those numbers tell part of the story. The more revealing part is what the hybrid system does between those benchmarks: filling the torque valley below 4,000 rpm where naturally aspirated engines traditionally feel lazy, providing electric boost during hard acceleration, and enabling the V12 to rev freely at the top of its range without worrying about low-speed drivability. Here the HPEV philosophy becomes tangible. The electric motors handle the grunt work so the V12 can do what V12s do best: scream toward redline with the kind of mechanical drama that turbocharged engines simply cannot replicate.
Road & Track named the Revuelto its 2025 Performance Car of the Year, which suggests the execution lives up to the philosophy. Multiple owners on enthusiast forums describe the car as a generational leap over the Aventador in terms of daily usability and outright speed, though the consensus around long-term hybrid maintenance costs remains unsettled. Lamborghini’s official materials do not address service intervals or battery longevity in detail, and prospective buyers should expect those questions to sharpen as more cars accumulate mileage.
How Lamborghini’s Hybrid Strategy Compares to the Competition
Every major supercar manufacturer now sells a hybrid flagship, and the philosophical differences between them reveal more than any spec sheet. Ferrari’s SF90 Stradale, the most direct competitor, uses a twin-turbocharged V8 augmented by three electric motors. McLaren’s Artura pairs a twin-turbo V6 with a single electric motor. Both are formidable machines. Neither kept a naturally aspirated engine.
That is the core of Lamborghini’s competitive argument. In an era where turbocharging became the default path to meeting emissions targets while maintaining power output, Lamborghini chose to preserve natural aspiration and use electrification to compensate for the efficiency penalties that come with it. The trade-off is a relatively modest all-electric range. One report indicates approximately six miles of pure electric driving, functionally a parking-lot-and-neighborhood capability rather than a meaningful commuting range. Lamborghini clearly views the battery as a performance tool, not a green-commuting feature, and the HPEV label reflects exactly that priority.
Ferrari’s approach with the SF90 optimizes for combined system output and lap times, leveraging turbocharging for maximum specific output per liter. McLaren’s Artura prioritizes weight savings and packaging efficiency. Lamborghini’s HPEV strategy prioritizes emotional character: the sound, the throttle response, the mechanical connection that a high-revving naturally aspirated engine provides. Each philosophy reflects a different answer to the same question, and each will attract a different buyer.
For Lamborghini’s core audience, the preservation of natural aspiration is not a trivial detail. It is the reason many of them chose a Lamborghini over a turbocharged rival in the first place. Foschini’s HPEV framing acknowledges this directly. The hybrid system exists to keep the V12 alive, not to replace it.
Beyond the Powertrain: What the Revuelto Tells Us About Lamborghini’s Direction
The Revuelto sits on a carbon-fiber monocoque with a forged composite front structure, rides on Lamborghini MagnaRide adaptive dampers, and stops with carbon-ceramic brakes featuring 10-piston front calipers. Rear-wheel steering and an electronically controlled rear wing round out a chassis specification that reads like a greatest-hits list of modern supercar technology. One report indicates 13 distinct drive modes, a breadth that suggests a car designed to cover a wider behavioral range than the Aventador ever attempted, and another expression of the HPEV idea that electrification should expand capability rather than narrow it.
Car and Driver lists the MSRP at $608,358, positioning the Revuelto firmly in the upper reaches of the production supercar market. Customization options are extensive, particularly for exterior and interior treatments, though some features enthusiasts might consider standard, including smartphone connectivity and a premium audio system, are reportedly optional. Buyers configuring a Revuelto should budget for the options list as carefully as they budget for the base price.
The broader significance extends beyond the Revuelto’s own spec sheet. It establishes the template for Lamborghini’s electrified future. The Temerario, the brand’s new V8-powered model positioned below the Revuelto, follows the same HPEV philosophy with a twin-turbocharged engine and hybrid assistance. According to one report, Lamborghini’s Direzione Cor Tauri strategy aims to electrify all models in its lineup, making the Revuelto’s hybrid architecture a proving ground for the company’s entire product roadmap.
The most interesting question Lamborghini faces is how long the naturally aspirated V12 can survive in this format. Regulations tighten on a predictable schedule, and even with electric assistance offsetting some emissions penalties, the window for a 6.5-liter naturally aspirated engine in a production car is not infinite. The Revuelto may represent the last generation where such an engine is viable at scale. If that turns out to be the case, Foschini’s insistence on the HPEV label takes on additional weight: it becomes the vocabulary for an era that will not come again.
What Waiting Buyers and Enthusiasts Should Take Away
Foschini’s public commentary and the HPEV branding exercise accomplish something specific for Lamborghini. They give the Revuelto a narrative framework that separates it from every other plug-in hybrid on the market. Whether that framework holds up under scrutiny depends on how the car drives, and early indications from automotive publications and owner communities are overwhelmingly positive.
For buyers on the waiting list, the practical takeaway is straightforward. The Revuelto is a fundamentally different car from the Aventador in how it delivers its power, how it manages low-speed driving, and how it integrates technology into the cockpit. The V12 remains the emotional centerpiece, but the experience around it is more refined, more versatile, and significantly faster. The dual-clutch gearbox alone transforms the ownership experience for anyone who found the Aventador’s single-clutch unit charming in theory and punishing in traffic.
Lamborghini’s decision to coin a new category label rather than accept an existing one reveals how seriously the company takes the perception battle around electrification. In Sant’Agata Bolognese, the hybrid system is not a compromise. It is the mechanism that keeps the V12 breathing. For a brand built on emotional excess, that distinction is worth defending, and Foschini’s films make clear that Lamborghini intends to defend it loudly.
