Back in 2023, Italian supercar maker Lamborghini announced it was going to enter into the electric age in style by bringing to life the Lanzador, a 1,341-horsepower “Ultra GT” that would be the most powerful car the brand had ever made by some considerable margin.
That dream, Lamborghini confirmed yesterday, has been shelved. Mirroring similar retreats from electrification made by other high-end automakers recently, the company announced the car will no longer be put into production.
Speaking to WIRED, the carmaker’s chief executive, Stephan Winkelmann, says that after a year of talking to dealers and looking at market and customer data, “it was clear not only that the acceptance of full electric cars is flattening worldwide for our type of cars, it’s going almost to zero—if not to zero.”
Winkelmann says that although Lamborghini is ready for electric car manufacturing, “the [high-end] market is not.” As a result, Winkelmann says that the brand decided “in the last few weeks or days” that its first model in the next era for Lamborghini powertrains will be not full EV but a plug-in hybrid.
“So by the end of this decade, all four [Lamborghinis] are going to be hybrids, and not, as we said, two of them electric,” Winkelmann says, confirming that this new hybrid will arrive in 2029.
To outline the significance and expense of such a U-turn from the carmaker, the Lamborghini Lanzador was not merely a static concept car but a full working vehicle with a finalized interior and exterior design, capable of driving on public roads. Indeed, WIRED was one of the very few media outlets to get a drive in the electric car with its “spaceship-inspired nose” in September 2023, though the company did underline at the time the drivetrain was not representative of the final production model, which was due to arrive in 2028.
This move from Lamborghini underlines the parlous state of luxury EVs at present, a trend WIRED has charted. Bentley announced in late 2024 that it’s pushing its electric plans back five years to 2035, blaming poor EV demand and weak charging infrastructure. Aston Martin has pushed back the launch of its first all-electric car, now aiming for late in the decade. The Genesis G80 has been discontinued in the US. Despite the imminent launch of the electric Cayenne, Porsche, faced with plummeting operating profits, has taken a huge financial hit to dramatically scale back its electrification efforts.
Mercedes, instead of going fully EV by 2030, is now planning to keep gas and hybrid cars on sale for longer. CEO Ola Källenius has called this a “course correction”, admitting EV sales have been slower than expected. In the first quarter of 2025, Merc sold just 1,450 of its flagship $162,000 electric G-Wagen in Europe, German newspaper Handelsblatt revealed.
The picture is very different for worldwide EV sales for brands not in the high end, however. In 2025, global EV registrations rose 20 percent to 20.7 million. China hit 12.9 million EV registrations, up 17 percent from 2024. Europe recorded 4.3 million, up 33 percent. Only the US bucked this trend, seeing flat growth in 2025, about 1 percent. Tesla fared worse, dropping in scale and profitability, with deliveries down 9 percent compared to 2024.
Felipe Munoz, a researcher from Car Industry Analysis, says that in Europe, the situation is not good for the luxury electrics. “Basically all but one of the models available in Europe last year posted declines,” he says. According to research from Dataforce, the worst drop was recorded by the Lucid Air, down by 49 percent versus 2024. The Rolls-Royce Spectre was down by 44 percent, while the Mercedes EQS SUV fell by 43 percent. The only winner was the BMW i7, up by 14 percent.
“For the Lanzador we did the market analysis, we showed this car around the globe, and we had all the details and responses,” says Winkelmann. “The discussion was based on a lot of data. Also, we see much more regionalization and differentiation. We have to see what is going to happen in Europe, the big Asian market, and, for sure, the US.”
“Manufacturers throughout the automotive industry are reevaluating their electric vehicle plans as they weigh demand against current economic conditions,” says Philip Nothard, Cox Automotive’s insight director. “For luxury brands, which operate lower volumes and higher R&D costs, these challenges are even more pronounced.”
I ask if Winkelmann can explain why luxury EVs are failing so badly when lower price points in the sector are doing so well. “First of all, there is no need to buy a car like Lamborghini. Then, for sure, there is the experience with electric cars on purchase price, resale value and residual value, and also in terms of technology.”
Here Winkelmann is referring to the eye-watering drops in value some high-end EVs are experiencing, with brands like Porsche losing up to half the car’s value in just a year. Meanwhile, other marques had lux EVs that lost more than $600 each day.
“Then there is the fact that technology, in the eyes of our customers, is going to be obsolete in 10 years from now,” says Winkelmann, “because there’s a lot of new tech. This is the idea of the majority of our customers, and the experience they have had with electric cars, even in different segments, and charging times.”
Winkelmann says he does not know if fast-charging and high-capacity solid state battery technology will be developed in time for the brand’s new deadline of 2029, however.
The announcement is another reminder that Ferrari, already irrevocably committed to launching its first full EV, the Luce, later this year, is yet another luxury automaker that has chosen (or been forced) to dramatically scale back its EV plans. Lamborghini’s addition to the ranks of high-end marques pulling the plug on full EVs potentially doesn’t bode well for the Luce.
However, Daniele Ministeri, senior consultant at automotive analysts JATO, says that this need not spell disaster for the Italian brand’s first electric car. “Ferrari has already faced criticism in the past for certain product decisions, most notably for introducing a SUV, the Purosangue,” he says. “However, two years after its launch, the Purosangue has proven to be a commercial and brand success, quickly becoming one of Ferrari’s best‑selling models. Whether the new Luce will generate the same level of enthusiasm remains difficult to predict. Still, Ferrari has successfully drawn strong attention to the project.”
Winkelmann says Lamborghini’s decision to delay full electrification has nothing to do with Ferrari’s or any other competitor brand’s backpedalling. “We know what our neighbors are doing. But we have our own strategy, and it’s good to have a comparison—but we need to be responsible for what we do. This is the right decision for us.”
Munoz says that although Europe is not the largest market for EVs, it is still the second after China, which gives an idea of how difficult it has been for these cars to gain traction. “When it is about supercars, the transition is even more difficult,” he says, “because they are usually associated to big petrol engines with a loud sound. Ferrari’s upcoming EV will face tough times to compete against its own ICE siblings. What Ferrari can’t do is to repeat the mistakes of Porsche with the Taycan. It started very solid, but soon it lost appeal to the other ICE models of the brand.”
Disclaimer : This story is auto aggregated by a computer programme and has not been created or edited by DOWNTHENEWS. Publisher: wired.com
