But the most outrageous ideas that Lamborghini has put in this box so far aren’t the ones that hit your eyeballs and drop your jaw. It’s that they’re working with MIT professors and students to figure out how to use supercapacitors in a way that simultaneously captures and releases energy, and investigating ways to build the car’s body and components with carbon fiber nanotubes that can act as (and maybe one day replace) the lithium-ion batteries that power today’s electric cars.
There are some other wild ideas being talked about already — like making this carbon fiber nanotube structure self-healing — but there are concrete goals to match these ambitions, even if the Terzo Millennio isn’t as specific and prescriptive as the Asterion concept from 2014.
The partnership is contracted to last three years, according to Lamborghini, and is costing the company around €200,000 per year (though quick shushing from some executives stopped reporters from being able to figure out exactly what that figure applies to).
On the carbon fiber nanotube battery side, Lamborghini hopes to settle on materials in year one; year two will be about getting the structure to store and release energy; and year three will be about building this into a 3D geometry, which would hopefully dramatically increase the possible energy capacity of a car this size.
