The High-Tech Tools Of Supercar Production

Lamborghini is just one of those brands that everyone knows. The angular shapes and wild colors of their supercars are enough to stop the most jaded passer-by in their tracks, the net result of decades of vehicle designs that push the fine line running between outré and outrageous.

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But as a vintage Italian brand, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Lamborghini’s manufacturing processes are dictated more by the frequency of cigarette breaks than the latest improvements in efficiency and environmental awareness. You would be wrong, as I have recently discovered.

I was lucky enough to be given a rare peek inside Lamborghini’s factory in Sant’Agata Bolognese, still on the same grounds where Ferruccio built the first prancing bull in the mid-1960s. Only today’s factory is bright, clean, and loaded with enough modern touches and technologies to not only make the production of high-end hypercars more repeatable, but more environmentally friendly, too. Join me for a tour.

If there’s one word to describe the factory floor at Lamborghini, it’s “bright.” Most surfaces are a glaring white, blindingly bouncing the high-intensity lights shining from all over the place. It’s not a great venue for anyone with light sensitivity issues. Still, it’s an ideal workspace for building high-precision machines, like the 1,001-horsepower Revuelto, which started rolling off this factory floor just last year.

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Interestingly, unlike many traditional factories that see vehicle chassis running through on rigid lines, stopping only long enough for someone to screw in a bolt or plug in a harness, Lamborghini’s production line instead relies on individual trollies.

These self-guided shuttles are big and strong enough to support the full weight of an assembled car, and smart enough to move from station to station on their own. Individual stations are defined for things like installing seats or suspension, much lengthier and more involved tasks than typically found in automotive assembly factories.

This flexibility will enable Lamborghini to extend this line to include the Temerario, the company’s upcoming V8-powered replacement for the Huracan. Soon, both models will run down the same line, but before you can start to build anything, you need to start by finding all the pieces.

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If you’re someone who enjoys hunting through a bag of Lego or a perhaps the box of a Gundam kit to find all the right parts before you begin, you’d enjoy the first step of assembly at Lamborghini. Before the Revuelto’s incredible V12 begins to take shape, a worker gathers all the parts into a large, multi-drawer cart.

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Each drawer is foam-lined, with precise cut-outs designed to fit exactly one part and one part only. You know how when an assassin opens up a suitcase full of pieces of a disassembled weapon, and everything is packaged Just So? Yeah, it’s like that, but unlike that assassin who will then surely begin a gratuitous montage of assembling that weapon by feel, Lamborghini workers have some technology at their side to figure out which part goes where.

On their hand, they wear a small scanner that, when you squeeze your index and thumb fingers together, projects a sniper-like target. With gun-finger drawn, they turn to a shelf full of bins, each with illuminated LEDs and QR codes displayed on E Ink tags. Digitally shoot the QR code, and the system indicates how many of a given part is needed and where it should go.

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Then, the worker just needs to slot their parts into the appropriate places and move on to the next. All the while, an E Ink tablet on the side of the parts cart updates with every success, digitally ticking off each target. When complete, Lamborghini can not only be sure that every part was properly gathered, but can keep a digital record of the specific parts used on each car.

If there’s one problem it’s that the glove is a bit uncomfortable, but a factory worker told me they’re upgrading to a QR-scanning smart ring soon. Progress!

Once all the bits and pieces have been gathered, engine assembly begins. This happens off to the side of the main assembly line, with individual workers building up the Revuelto’s big, 6.5-liter V12 from the aforementioned cart of parts.

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This process is obviously a little more involved than the initial gathering stage, requiring a fair bit of knowledge and training to get right to ensure that parts like pistons and connecting rods, which will be slung around at upwards of 9,500 RPM, don’t make a break for it the first time the engine is put to the test.

But, there’s some digital guidance here, enough so that I was allowed to assist in the addition of the head to one of engine’s twin banks of six cylinders each. The head forms the top of the engine, providing intake of clean air and output of burned exhaust. It also holds all the valves and the various other bits that ensure they move up and down in perfect harmony with the big pistons below.

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A metal gasket sits between the main engine block and the head, and after setting that in place and the engine head itself upon that, I was then instructed on how to bolt it down. A series of bolts run vertically down through the head and into the block, each of which required a quick dab of dark, goopy anti-seize before being dropped into place.

After that, I was handed a Makita right-angle torque wrench, which automatically zipped the bolt down into place and at precisely the right initial torque — 30 Newton meters, to be specific. When the light was green, I could move on to the next bolt. Easy.

Engines are great, but they don’t do much good if you don’t have a chassis into which you can mount them. For the Revuelto, that means slapping a lot of carbon fiber into increasingly complex shapes to form the main tub — the so-called monocoque — of the car, plus other main structural components, like the bodywork and even parts of the interior.

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Lamborghini uses a variety of different processes with varying degrees of automation, but a significant portion of the process is extremely hands-on, which I was able to sample myself.

Carbon fiber is made up of sheets of interwoven threads of carbon, forming the namesake fiber. Those woven fibers are then coated in a sticky resin, creating a more or less ready-to-use material called “pre-preg.” This resin-infused material comes in sheets that are computer-cut to match precise templates, but after that, they’re laid up by hand, stacked one upon the other into molds of all sizes.

I got a taste of this on a small mold, setting one layer upon another of the black, sticky, smelly material. I was given a series of tools to help jam the stuff into corners and crevices, mostly bone picks and the like of the sort that have been used in bookbinding and tannery for hundreds of years, now applied to some rather more high-tech stuff.

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Applying one layer required that I first extract every tiny bubble of air from the layer beneath, then once everything was applied, the component was put into a sturdy bag, and all the air was sucked out of it. It sat there for a few minutes while the outside air pressure compressed every layer together, before the whole contraption was sent off to bake in an autoclave. The result? A beautiful, shiny, lightweight, and durable part.

One of the final steps in preparing that chassis is manually creating a number of bolt holes and mounting points in the resulting carbon structure, a process where precision is incredibly important. To help this, Lamborghini created a program using a Microsoft HoloLens 2 that virtually projects the location for each threaded, Helicoil insert.

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Once everything is in place, the chassis is mounted up to one of the aforementioned autonomous shuttles and it makes its run down the production line, until it finally reaches the point called the “first marriage.” Here, in a somewhat rushed ceremony, engine and monocoque are mated together, a conjugal process under the bright lights.

There is a second marriage to come, though, what Lamborghini terms the “last marriage.” This is when the electrical drivetrain of the Revuleto (and, soon, the Temerario) is mounted to the chassis. This entails hoisting up the electric motors up front and the 3.8-kilowatt-hour battery that runs down the length of the car to power it all. Mix in some bright orange high-voltage cabling, and you’re almost ready to roll.

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It’s a heck of a process, which ends under even more intense lights as the final inspections occur, ensuring there isn’t a single blemish on the skin of the machine before it rolls away under its own power for the first time. But the job isn’t done for Lamborghini. There’s still the question of what to do with all the scraps and waste produced during the production of the Revuelto.

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Those carbon fibers are snipped and trimmed during manufacturing, creating a series of pieces of various sizes, but too small to make the bigger bits that Lamborghini needs. The larger of these pieces are donated to local trade schools, where students use them to practice working with the expensive material; students who, in turn, often find jobs at Lamborghini.

Smaller bits are sent away for processing, where they’re effectively shredded and cleared of resin using a process called pyrolysis. The resulting raw fibers are then blended together to create new sheets of material. These lack the beautiful weave of carbon fiber but still offer much the same weight and durability benefits. This is a new process that Lamborghini will use to create the upcoming Temerario’s underbody protection.

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It’s all part of a broader directive called Cor Tauri, with the goal of decreasing the company’s overall environmental impact. Further developments to reduce the factory’s carbon footprint will surely result in even more advanced initiatives being deployed on the production line, but in my brief time on the factory floor, it was reassuring to see just how much hands-on craftsmanship still plays a major part. Even as factory efficiencies increase, that’s not likely to change.