Yahoo Autos Lamborghini's Forgotten Pregunta Concept Was Really Born From Jets
Just last week, we marked the anniversary of Chrysler purchasing Lamborghini. It was a strange, short affair that wrangled a long-forgotten Lamborghini concept car out of it, and a cab-forward legacy for Chrysler that its marketing department today all but forgets.
If the Portofino was a "what-if" question (what if there was a four-door Lamborghini? What if Chrysler played off its design for the better part of a decade?) then the Pregunta was an open-ended one: a question in Spanish, a question to Lamborghini's future, and a question shouted defiantly: what if our cars looked like fighter jets?
The Bertone-designed Pregunta debuted at the Paris Motor Show in October of 1998, a month after Audi AG acquired the company. Lamborghini had been controlled by Indonesian holding company Megatech, a billionaire's adventure game registered in Bermuda, whose former executive was convicted of hiring an assassin to kill an Indonesian judge. The constantly shifting endeavour had barely been able to scrape by when the 1997 Asian financial crisis hit. It was the final straw.
In Germany, however, things were booming quite nicely. The same year that Indonesia melted down, Volkswagen introduced a twelve-cylinder supercar of its own and CEO Ferdinand Piech went on a shopping spree, snapping up Bentley, Bugatti and Lamborghini. Under Audi's fold, Lamborghini was about to do great things. But there was still something from the Diablo generation to show off.
No car can wear its aviation-wannabe credentials as a Lamborghini. Case in point: the Pregunta featured carbon-fiber bodywork built by Heuliez, overlaid with the same matte-grey paint used on the Dassault Rafale fighter jet. The lights were fiber optics. The curvy, colorful, painfully-Nineties cockpit-complete with gated shifter!-mimicked fighter-jet glass screens and featured rear-view cameras instead of mirrors and nascent GPS navigation. The seats looked like they could eject. The doors opened skyward, naturally, taking with them huge and swoopy air intakes.
Specs included the Diablo's chassis and running gear, modified to rear-drive only, and pumping out 530 horsepower from its V-12. It could hit the standing kilometer in just 20 seconds. Nearly every press photo saw it parked in front of a Rafale, including the period promotional video above, where the two tried to race. With a rumored 206mph top speed the Pregunta held up pretty well, at least until the pesky airborne business. But it still looked like it could take right off.
And as recently as 2013, French dealer Autodrome put it up for auction, at a little over two million dollars.
Lamborghini has built many crazy, outlandish, and long-forgotten concept cars-it's what it does best. Long before the F-22-inspired Reventon, long before the Megatron-inspired Veneno, the Pregunta posed a question that's been answered, repeatedly, ever since.
