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At the annual Miami Art Week, this Lamborghini Urus was on display with an appropriately outrageous graphic treatment.
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The Urus SE SUV was there to showcase the Italian automaker’s Ad Personam atelier, which will, for a price, fulfill customers’ dreams.
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How much for this graffiti-inspired Urus? Lamborghini isn’t saying, although a “plain” Urus starts at nearly a quarter-million dollars, so, more than that.
Lamborghinis are not known for their modesty. They are extroverted cars, layered in bold strakes and spoilers, and look their best in outrageous insectoid colors. The same can be said for Miami Beach, where the Art Deco hotels lining the oceanfront are painted to resemble pastel Easter eggs, and formal dress for toned visitors is a budgie smuggler and Balenciaga slides.
So it makes perfect sense that the Italian Charging Bull brand would choose South Florida, and the local Miami Art Week lifestyle and brand activation bacchanal, to unveil an extra-uninhibited, asymmetrically striated, customized iteration of its high-test Urus SE sport-utility monster, one that it looks, fittingly, like a maze in which a bull-headed minotaur could get lost.
“The colors are inspired by Miami, and Miami to me is the light of the sunrise, a ray of light that rises from the front left of the car to the right rear,” says Lamborghini design director Mitja Borkert as he walks us around the wonkily dizzying model at an advance viewing, prior to the brand’s private shindig in South Beach. “And Miami is famous for its graffiti. We wanted to do a Lamborghini graffiti on a building here, but the City of Miami said no. So, we decided, let’s take graffiti art as a base for a graphical car.”
On the outside, this singular Urus is slathered in variegated layers of four Lamborghini paint hues: Grigio Telesio (gray), Nero Noctus (black), Blu Glauco (sea blue), and Grigio Hati (off-white). According to Borkert, true Lamborghinisti take pride in knowing the complicated monikers the marque assigns its colorways and like to challenge and one-up each other by reciting them. The overall visual effect is a bit like the end of that Salvador Dalí-designed surrealist dream sequence in Hitchcock’s Spellbound in which Gregory Peck falls through a hole in a melting spoked wheel and is chased by a giant winged Gorgon down a tilted mirrored pyramid in a scalding desert. It’s not at all frightening, but it is certainly immersive.
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“One of our key goals with this design is that it should underscore the lines of the car, graphically, emphasizing the proportions of the Urus,” Borkert says. Mission accomplished. “Also, we wanted to have fun, and demonstrate the maximum most sophisticated capabilities of our Ad Personam workshop.”
This atelier, at Lambo’s headquarters in Sant’Agata, Italy, is where the brand does its customization work. It was created to help its clients express their taste and open their crypto wallets.
Sadly, things aren’t quite as interesting inside, where bolts of stygian charcoal leather, Alcantara, and carbon fiber cover every surface, save a few bright red highlights. These include the anodized door handles, the cross-stitching on the dash and steering wheel, and, of course, the jet fighter missile-launcher-inspired start button.
We asked Borkert why the interior wasn’t more colorful. “We focused on the exterior,” he said, shrugging and smiling. This makes sense for Miami as well, where many people are similarly superficial.
The menacing five-door doesn’t receive any upgrades to its 789-hp plug-in hybridized twin-turbo V-8 and trick electronic rear limited-slip differential, which is probably fine since that powertrain already provides the Urus with drifting capabilities that would put a lake-effect snowstorm to shame. It does look faster than other Urus SEs we’ve seen and driven.
Borkert explains that this particular Urus SE will be the first to be delivered to a customer globally. However, unlike other special Art Week editions the brand has revealed, it is not strictly a one-off. “If another customer wanted this kind of livery, theoretically, we could do one just like this in the same color,” Borkert says.
The car is, however, like all Lamborghinis produced, already sold. If you have to ask the price, you definitely can’t afford it, but I asked anyway. Borkert wouldn’t tell me. Perhaps the new owner will ask Ad Personam to emblazon the cost on the trucklet’s flanks. With Lamborghini, being uncouth is a strong part of the allure.
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