Spied: The Huracán Sterrato off-road concept inches towards reality
Remember the summer of 2019? Those tender, innocent days when the mid-engine Corvette was still a mystery, Dodge hadn’t yet shoehorned a 702-hp Hemi into a half-ton, and Lamborghini unveiled a Huracàn concept with dreams of tackling sand dunes?
Nope, we aren’t playing two truths and a lie. Back in June of 2019, the engineers at Sant’Agata really did put their crazy heads together and figure out what a Lambo supercar might need to venture off-road—and not immediately fall apart.
Now, we’ve just received evidence from spy shooters that this crazy-go-nuts concept, which was officially dubbed the Huracán Sterrato, may actually be headed to production in some form. Here it is, spied tossing snow about in the wild.
The basic recipe behind the concept: Take the Huracán EVO (the hotted-up one), give it a couple-inch lift, widen the front and rear tracks by about 30mm, and retune its four-wheel-drive system for low-traction surfaces. Garnish with some aluminum skid plates, generously sectioned rubber, a roof-mounted LED bar, and some mud guards and voilà: A Lambo for unpaved adventures. The vehicle spied here doesn’t appear to have the bolt-on fender extensions flaunted by the 2019 concept, but we doubt that such an addition would faze the development team.
Come on, Lamborghini, you may be thinking. Did anyone ask for this? If you haven’t trawled the automotive sector of Instagram recently, know that approximately every youngster between the ages of 30 and 15 is dreaming of taking anything and everything off-road. The adventuresome schtick has its hooks in the millennial and Gen Z generations: Add a roof rack, additional fog lights, and chunky all-terrains to a vehicle, whether Toyota 4Runner, or BMW M Coupe, or ’80s Volvo wagon, and you’ve cast a magic spell of coolness over it.
Companies from Singer to Maybach to Subaru and Toyota are tapping into the trend, too. In January of 2021, the boutique Porsche restomod shop created the rally-ready ACS, or All-terrain Competition Study, from a 1990 911 on special commission. This winter, Maybach debuted a 19-foot-long electric exercise in off-roadable excess. The trend isn’t lost on more pedestrian brands, either: Subaru treated its Outback and Forester to extra-outdoorsy makeovers and slapped on the Wilderness badge. Hell, Toyota decked its Sienna minivan out with a roof rack and a lift. The title: Woodland Edition.
The “overlanding” crowd has no illusions about these vehicles’ stated purpose deviating from the intended usage, but what they do have are wild imaginations and a thirst for the outdoors. That Lamborghini wants to take a Huracán where no Huracán was ever supposed to go is, in its own inexplicable way, pretty rad.
What think you? Should Lamborghini be praised or derided for developing the Huracán Sterrato?
