Maurizio Reggiani shakes his head with regret. Without a word, Lamborghini's R&D director indicates that manual transmissions have no future in his company's cars. Only a tiny fraction of customers choose a stick shift for their Gallardo, and Lamborghini's new Aventador comes with a fully automated seven-speed single-clutch transmission, and no manual transmission. Just 1 to 2 percent of the cars rolling out of the company's small Sant'Agata Bolognese factory are equipped with three pedals, Reggiani says.
A manual transmission, explains the R&D director, is a break in the electronic chain of command that harmonizes absolutely everything that happens between engine combustion chamber and tire contact patch. The only way Lamborghini can guarantee soothing smoothness in city driving or back-thumpingly explosive acceleration on a winding road is for every system in the car to be interconnected. You can't rely on a driver to always shift gears without glitches, Reggiano says. But you can count on next year's replacement for the now-8-year-old Gallardo to come only with an automated transmission.
The Gallardo replacement, currently under development and rumored to be named Cabrera, may not be the next new Lamborghini. Reggiani says within the next few months, the company will make public its decision whether or not to produce the Sesto Elemento show car. Lamborghini is expected to commit to the construction of a tiny number of replicas of its 2010 Paris show concept, and the car will be strictly a track-day special.
According to Reggiani, some of the advanced carbon-fiber construction techniques showcased in the Sesto Elemento are nearing production feasibility. The car's central tub, for example, is made from a forged composite. Short strands of carbon-fiber randomly distributed through a blob of resin are squeezed and then briefly cooked in a heated die. Reggiani thinks this method of carbon-fiber construction is ready for application in the automotive field.
"The material costs more or less the same (as conventional carbon fiber)," he says. "The real difference is in manufacturing time." A complex part can be made in just five minutes, slower than stamping steel or aluminium, but much faster than current carbon-fiber construction methods. Aside from lightness, Reggiani says forged composites have other advantages. For example, the material can be drilled without developing the stress concentrations that always occur in a bored metal part.
But Lamborghini isn't concentrating only on the development of high-tech supercars of tomorrow. There's also a newfound focus on building today's models better.
Currently turning out just 1200 cars a year, the assembly line doesn't move at anywhere near Detroit pace. In fact, the workers at each station on the Gallardo and Aventador lines have one to two hours to complete their complex set of tasks. To make sure they get it right, Lamborghini has introduced a near-foolproof component delivery system, plus large touch screens at every station providing ready access to the appropriate chapter of the "How to Build A Lambo" manual.
A new system called cubing, recently introduced for the Aventador, improves body build accuracy. The name comes from the cubes of aluminum that are milled to create reference jigs that can hold complete sets of adjoining body parts, such as an entire nose, including hood, fenders, and headlights. Or an entire body side, including the door. Other quality-enhancing changes are small and simple, like the adoption of new leather-stitching needles in the trim shop. They have asymmetric points designed to pierce the leather in a way that compensates for the distorting effect of the twist in the stitching yarn. Is this starting to sound a little obsessive?
Maybe it's nothing more than coincidence, but Lamborghini's quality director, Holger Weichhaus, is German. So are the executives in charge of the purchasing and production readiness departments. Having masterminded ways to improve body build accuracy for the Aventador, Lamborghini's Germans are now bringing a more disciplined approach to the company's relationship with its suppliers. Today's Lamborghinis contain parts made by around 500 different companies that supply everything from body tooling to headlights. Some 70 to 80 percent of these suppliers already work for the Volkswagen Group, which, via Audi, is the ultimate owner of Lamborghini.
Making sure every single part is exactly as it should be before production begins takes time. A long time. "At the moment, we are working on cars for 2014," says purchasing boss Eike Poslednik. He can apparently scratch manual transmission parts off the list.
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