Driving Lamborghini’s $600,000 Ultra-Powerful Plug-In Hybrid

No longer are supercars powered strictly by muscular V8 and V12 engines, producing a mighty roar as they burn gallons of gas at a ferocious rate. Today’s entries can have hybrid, plug-in hybrid, or pure electric drive. But they’re still awesomely fast, with neck-snapping acceleration.

The new Lamborghini Revuelto, a novel form of plug-in hybrid, puts out an eye-opening 1,001 horsepower (with 739 pound-feet of torque) via a combination of three electric motors (two on the front axle) and a mid-mounted—and exposed to the elements—V12 that, by itself, produces 825 horsepower. It manages to produce more power with some beneficial weight loss. That’s coupled to an eight-speed dual-clutch automatic (with manual paddles) and a 3.8-kilowatt-hour battery pack (with LG cells) that gives the Revuelto five or six miles of all-electric travel.

Hybrid drive in the Revuelto is not so much to achieve better fuel economy, though that’s one result, but is primarily a way of boosting power output as needed. It also yields all-wheel drive. Sales started early this year, and Lamborghini plans to produce about 1,500 to 1,600 Revueltos annually (with the supply limited by the company’s ability to produce its carbon-fiber structure). The inventory is sold out until 2026. As is true of many supercar companies, the SUV is the biggest seller—Lamborghini produces about 5,000 Urus SUV models each year.

The Lamborghini Revueltos in convoy in the Hudson Valley.
Lamborghini photo

The list price of the 2024 Revuelto is US$604,363. As tested, with the biggest option being US$13,100 for the special greyish paint, the bottom line was US$681,258. Lamborghini handed over the Revuelto keys at the 140-acre Wildflower Farms resort in Gardiner, N.Y., for a 90-minute drive around the scenic Hudson Valley. Although the car is capable of a stated 217 miles per hour in the right context, it was still huge fun to drive it at much more moderate speeds on the curvy local roads.

Matteo Ortenzi, product line director for the Revuelto, explained that having two motors up front increases the opportunity for effective torque vectoring, which improves handling by delivering power to the individual wheels as needed. “The feel is of a lighter and more powerful car,” Ortenzi says. “We didn’t build the Revuelto just to say we did a hybrid.”

As in other hybrids, the Revuelto returns power to the battery on deceleration, a process called “regenerative” braking or in Ortenzi’s words, “using negative torque.” After the 90-minute drive, the Revuelto still had a 90% charge. Lamborghini doesn’t think owners will need to plug it in often, though it provides a charging cord. The charge portal is actually under the front hood, a “frunk” where the car has its limited luggage space.

A row of Revueltos with scissor doors up.
Jim Motavalli photo

Entering through the vertically opening scissor doors requires some agility, but soon becomes second nature. Leg room is good, and the bolstered seats hold the driver in firmly—a good thing considering the speeds and g-forces the car can achieve. The gauges are brightly digital, with huge single-digit numbers for the gear selected. There’s an 8.4-inch touchscreen mounted centrally, and a third 12.3-inch unit for the passenger. The start-stop button is under a military-grade protective cover.

The drive started in EV mode, yielding a quiet getaway that didn’t disturb resort guests. Small dials on the dash control the driving modes. Città (city) is for city electric, Strada (street) for comfortable cruising, Sport (self-explanatory), and Corsa (race, for total performance).

All the modes were sampled, but Strada was a nice balance of performance and driving pleasure. Sometimes using paddles seems not worth the bother, but in the Revuelto the big flippers provided instant gear changes and a nice feeling of control. Slowing down, the transmission acts on its own to downshift. Everything works together: the tight steering (with rear-wheel steering, too), the firm but not harsh suspension, and the hugely reassuring carbon-ceramic brakes. The engine barks out a very Italian song. It’s quite a driver’s car, though not one that can take the family to Disneyland.

The Revueltos engine is exposed to the elements.
Jim Motavalli photo

In the classic muscle car, huge V8 engines were stuffed under the hoods of regular passenger vehicles, sometimes without much thought as to how the powerful result would get around corners or stop. The Revuelto, despite that fearsome 1,001 horsepower, seems to have been fully engineered to handle what it puts on the ground. It can reach 62 miles per hour in 2.5 seconds, with the driver in firm control.

Plug-in hybrids like the Revuelto are a big step toward battery EVs. Lamborghini showed the Lanzador, a fully electric concept car, during Monterey Car Week in 2023 . Exactly when a production model will appear is unclear. “It’s not when, but how,” Ortenzi says. “The world doesn’t need just another electric car; it needs an electric Lamborghini.”

Luke Michel has already lived through two technology overhauls in his career, first desktop publishing in the 1980s and online publishing later on. But AI? He’s had enough.

So when his employer, the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, made an early-retirement offer to some staff last year, the 68-year-old content strategist decided to speed up his exit. Before, he had expected to work a couple more years.

“The time and energy you have to devote to learning a whole new vocabulary and a whole new skill set, it wasn’t worth it,” he said.

It isn’t that he’s shunning artificial intelligence—he is learning Spanish with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. But, at this point, he’s less than eager to endure all the ways the technology promises to upend work.

“I just want to use it for my own purposes and not someone else’s,” he said.

After rising for decades and then hovering around 40% in the 2010s, the share of Americans over 55 years old in the workforce has slipped to 37.2%, the lowest level in more than 20 years.

The financial cushion of rising home equity and stock-market returns is driving some of the decline, economists and retirement advisers say.

But for some older professionals, money is only part of the equation.

They say they don’t want to spend the last years of their career going through the tumult of AI adoption, which has brought new tools, new expectations and a lot of uncertainty.

Many people retire when key elements of their work lives are disrupted at once, said Robert Laura , co-founder of the Retirement Coaches Association and an expert on the psychology of retirement.

“Maybe their autonomy is being challenged or changed, their friends are leaving the workplace, or they disagree with the company’s direction,” he said.

“When two or three of these things show up, that’s when people start to opt out.”

“AI is a big one,” he adds. “It disrupts their autonomy, their professionalism.”

Michel, whose work required overseeing and strategizing on website content, has been here before.

When desktop publishing arrived in the 1980s, he was a graphic designer using triangles and rubber cement.

The internet’s arrival changed everything again. Both developments required new skills, and he was energized by the challenge of learning alongside colleagues and peers.

It felt different this time around. “Your battery doesn’t hold a charge as long as it used to,” he said.

He would rather spend his energy volunteering, making art, going to operas and chairing the Council on Aging in North Andover, Mass., where he lives.

In an AARP survey last summer of 5,000 people 50 and over, 25% of those who planned to retire sooner than expected counted work stress and burnout as factors.

About half of those retired said they had left work at least partly because they had the financial security to do so.

In general, older Americans are less likely than younger counterparts to use AI, research shows.

About 30% of people from ages 30 to 49 said they used ChatGPT on the job, nearly double the share of those 50 and older, according to a 2025 Pew Research Center survey of more than 5,000 adults.

Baby boomers and members of Generation X also experienced the sharpest declines in confidence using AI technology, according to a ManpowerGroup survey of more than 13,900 workers in 19 countries.

“We as employers aren’t doing a good enough job saying (to older workers), we value the skills that you already have, so much so that we want to invest in you to help you do your job better,” says Becky Frankiewicz , ManpowerGroup’s chief strategy officer.

Jennifer Kerns’s misgivings about AI contributed to her departure last month from GitHub, where the 60-year-old worked as a program manager.

Coming from a family of artists, she said, it offends her that AI models train on the creative work of people who aren’t compensated for their intellectual property. And she worries about AI’s effect on people’s critical-thinking skills.

So she was dismayed when GitHub, a Microsoft-owned hosting service for software projects, began investing heavily in AI products and expecting employees to incorporate AI into much of their work. In employee-engagement surveys, the company had begun asking them to rate their AI usage on a scale of 1 to 5.

When it came time to write reports and reviews, colleagues would suggest that she use ChatGPT.

“I’d be like, ‘I have no idea how to use that and I have no interest in using AI to write anything for me,’” she said.

It would have been more prudent to work until she was closer to Medicare eligibility, she said. But by waiting until her children were out of college and some of her stock grants had vested, the math worked.

Her first act as a nonworking person: a solo trip to Scotland, where she took a darning workshop and learned how to repair sweaters.

“The opposite of AI,” she said.

Employers already under pressure to cut workers—such as in the tech industry—may welcome some of these retirements, said Gad Levanon , chief economist at Burning Glass Institute, which studies labor-market data.

“The more people retire, the fewer they have to let go,” he said.

Some of the savviest tech users are also balking at sticking around for the AI upheaval. Terry Grimm, who worked in IT for 40 years, retired from his senior software consultant role at 65 last May.

His firm had just been acquired by a bigger firm, which meant learning and integrating the parent company’s AI and other tech tools into his work.

Until then, Grimm expected he might work a couple more years, though he felt that he probably had enough saved to retire.

“I just got to the point where I was spending 40 hours at work and then 20 hours training and studying,” said Grimm, who has since moved with his wife from the Dallas area to a housing development on a golf course in El Dorado, Ark.

“I’m like, ‘I’ll let the younger guys do this.’”

Driving Lamborghini’s $600,000 Ultra-Powerful Plug-In Hybrid

Their careers spanned the personal computing, internet and smartphone waves. But some older workers see AI’s arrival as the cue to exit.