The fastest SUV? Our first drive in Lamborghini’s 641-horsepower Urus

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  A Lamborghini that can do it all? [credit: Jim Resnick ]

From time to time, Lamborghini does the unexpected. Not so much recently—many expected a new SUV from the Italian exotic automaker—but Lamborghini stunned automobiledom in the 1960s and 1970s. The original Miura sports car blueprints were initially thought by some to be for a race car, not a street car. Then, the Countach rewrote the exotic car design book and instantly became holy.

The next shocker was the LM002, a huge four-wheel-drive off-roading beast that actually began life in “LM001” phase as a proposal for a light-duty military vehicle. When not even one government nibbled at the thought of a military off-roader designed and built by an Italian company famous for temperamental exotic cars, Lamborghini had a major rethink and built highly revised LM002s from 1986 through 1993 for public sale. Most went to the very wealthy.

But more recently, as Lamborghini plays nice with its Porsche, Bentley, and Audi siblings and discovers the opportunities of platform sharing, the brand has also grown in its thinking and execution. Lamborghinis are now—deep breath—just about reliable enough to be used everyday. Couple this with the fact that more than half of Porsche’s sales now come from SUVs, and it indicates there’s room in the market for the Urus, the Lamborghini of SUVs.