Lamborghini Minotauro

The concept 2020 Lamborghini Minotauro comes straight from the imagination of student Andrei Avarvarii of the SPD - Scuola Politecnica di Design in Milan, where he took this on as a Master's degree student project. He had a pretty good project supervisor, though, in the shape of Filippo Perini, Lamborghini's design chief. As a student project, not a bad choice if you want to get your name out there.

So what is it? It's an electric car - a three seater supercar, in fact, because instead of a monster V12 engine, the space is used for an extra passenger. In this car there are four asynchronous motors that divide the power up into 70-percent at the rear and 30-percent at the front. The rear motors are powered by CERIO batteries from Li-Tec, the leader in the field of battery technology for electric cars of the future.

The lithium-ion flat cells produced by this Evonik subsidiary are safe and reliable for daily use in electric vehicles. With a high energy density, and a high safety level, they beat all the competition in comparison tests. With such high energy packed into a compact space in the flat cell, safety is obviously a major concern. Storing this energy as efficiently as possible is a must, since the car's mobility depends upon maximizing its energy storage density.

The front power in the 2020 Lamborghini Minotauro will be via a KERS system. This is such a simple idea that you wonder why it hasn't been used in motor vehicles from day one. Short for Kinetic Energy Recovery System, it grabs back the energy from the vehicle's inertia when you brake, so instead of heating up the atmosphere when you slow down, you're using that energy to charge your batteries.

The elegance of this solution lies in the fact that you already have a mechanical to electrical energy converter in your car, in the form of the electric motors. All that happens is they're used in their reverse role as generators. The rate at which KERS systems are being developed means that by the time this car is on the road, they'll be commonplace. The German government expects to have a million electric vehicles on the roads by the end of the decade.

Because you don't need conventional mufflers on the car, the space vacated by them will be used for the airflow to cool the battery powered motors at the rear. Air enters through side vents and flows over the hot areas and through two triangular "exhaust" outlets at the back. The designer says this will also blast the noise of the electric motors out with the heat.

The 2020 Lamborghini Minotauro, with its 2 x 75 HP motors in the front and 2 x 175 HP at the back, has a total power of 500 HP. The 2 x 300 NM front and 2 x 700 NM rear gives a total torque of 2000 NM. With a spec like that, you'd think Avarvarii would be satisfied, but no. The killer is in what he calls Real Life Online Gaming. So you race your Lambo round a real live racetrack and the GPS data gets uploaded to a games console network. That will be available for Playstation players globally to try to beat your time. Maybe you'll earn enough in royalties to pay for your Minotauro.