First look: Lambo lifts lid on Aventador Roadster

LAMBORGHINI has taken the wraps off an Aventador Roadster, which is expected to make its public world debut at the Los Angeles motor show later this month ahead of an anticipated Australian showroom arrival in the third quarter of next year.

The Aventador Roadster’s European price of €300,000 is around 17 per cent higher than the coupe, meaning the Australian price could be as much as $880,000 before on-road costs.

Claimed to be Lamborghini’s most exciting production car yet, the Aventador Roadster can match the coupe’s 350km/h top speed with the lightweight two-piece carbon-fibre roof removed.

Far more practical than the wild one-off Aventador J show car revealed at the Geneva show in March, the new Roadster also betters its open-topped Murcielago predecessor, the fabric roof of which limited the top speed to 160km/h while in place.

From the roof back, the Roadster is set apart from the standard Aventador by a unique rear window frame and engine cover.

An electrically operated rear windscreen can be lowered to change the amount of air flowing through the Roadster’s cabin and the amount of sound coming from the 515kW/690Nm 6.5-litre V12 engine.

For fluster-free open-topped driving, a wind deflector claimed to “deliver almost complete calm inside the car” can be attached to the front windscreen frame.

The deflector can be stowed along with the roof – which weighs less than six kilograms and is said to be easy to handle and easy to attach – in the luggage compartment.

In addition to supporting the removable roof, the rear frame also incorporates an automatic protection system for vehicle occupants and is designed to channel air toward the engine compartment.

Compared with the Aventador coupe’s stacked transparent engine cover, the Roadster has a pair of hexagonal windows on each side of a central spine, designed to allow hot air to escape from the engine compartment, drain off rain water and allow onlookers to admire the powerplant beneath.

A two-tone colour scheme has the windscreen pillar, roof and rear window frame painted gloss black, which Lambo says simulates the effect of a completely open vehicle.

The body colour applied to the car in these images is a new shade of blue called Azzuro Thetis that changes shade according to the angle of light, is exclusive to the Roadster and is inspired by the 1968 Miura Roadster.

Lamborghini describes the Roadster’s design as “the result of a careful study into the best way of combining performance, elegant style, ease of use and a driving experience that excites all five senses”.

The House of the Raging Bull has not revealed how chopping the top off its Aventador has affected weight (the coupe weighs 1575kg), but the car has new Dione forged alloy wheels claimed to save 10kg over the standard items.

A small weight penalty is suggested by the blast from rest to 100km/h being one-tenth slower than the coupe at 3.0 seconds.

Fuel consumption figures have not been announced for the Roadster, but it features the efficiency-boosting idle-stop and cylinder deactivation technologies recently introduced to the Aventador coupe, along with refinements to ride and handling.

Using super-capacitors to store energy from regenerative braking, the idle-stop system is claimed to fire up the engine in a “barely detectable” 180 milliseconds, while the cylinder deactivation system turns the V12 into a straight-six under low load and at speeds of less than 135km/h.

On the Aventador coupe these technologies help reduce average fuel consumption by seven per cent to 16 litres per 100 kilometres, while CO2 emissions can drop as much as 20 per cent depending on driving conditions.