When a Lamborghini Urus is in the room with you, you’ll know. Even if it’s creeping around in silent EV mode, which, newsflash, it can do now, and even if you’re facing the other direction, its presence is undeniable.
Hearts race, pupils dilate, children who aren’t crying are squeal in delight. The car just radiates badassery like an evil sun, which is 90% the point of a Lambo. You want drama? You get drama. Always have, always will.
New for 2025 is a plug-in hybrid powertrain. That’s what the “SE” means here. If you are minded to stick a plug in your big honking V8 monster truck, it will do more than 60km on electricity alone via a 189bhp electric motor. Together with the present-and-correct roaring V8 in the engine bay, you get 789bhp in total.
SIZZLE AND FLAIR
Outside, the typical facelift treatment has been applied, with the headlights being made shapelier and a butt that’s been massaged to recall the very cherished Gallardo. I might not have expected a styling update from a brand whose design studio only has rulers to reduce angularity, but somehow it works. The Urus’ face is now not just rude, it is rudely handsome.
It is very recognisably Audi in the interior tech, and that’s no bad thing. Everything makes sense. Giant A pillar and enormous wing mirrors aside, the interior mixes Lambo’s hexagon-themed extroversion with intuitiveness in perfectly agreeable fashion.
Lamborghini indulges us with aa big fistful of a gear-lever to yank. Just as importantly, the dizzying permutations of hybrid and chassis settings and sub-settings (a varying combination of Strada, Sport, Corsa, Neve, Sabbia, Terra, EV Drive, Hybrid, Performance, and Recharge) are also controlled by melodramatic levers and hard buttons.
It makes something one might never be inclined to touch into settings that are satisfying to play with and very easy to wrap one’s mind around. Having proper tactility can make all the positive difference in how one feels about powertrain complexity. That is at once commonsensical and a masterstroke in design.
In other hybrids, a Prius for example, one treads with delicacy, trying not to wake the oily, dirty, coarse dinosaur thing. Not here. Here the electric dimension is just another game mode in what is a laugh-out-loud amusement park ride.
FIERY AND ELECTRIFYING
There is zero concern electrification has diluted the hirsutism of the car. You prod, and frankly it doesn’t take much of a prod, just to deliberately provoke the V8 to fire with a guttural snort. It even rocks the car a bit.
It is like waking a literal sleeping bull by poking it in the nose with an iron rod. It’s chuckle-tastic and giggle-rific. After all, nobody buys a Lambo to be green unless you mean lime green and loud. It’s all about the excess here; A conspicuous indulgence in LOLz.
In more practical terms the electric motor does what does in any application and gives you snappy, immediate responses. So, you can sit within an inch of the car in front in a traffic jam and scare/annoy them quite easily.
The Urus may be enormous, but it can be precisely edged forward. Strada mode genuinely makes things quite civil, although crank the deliciously tactile toggles to Sport and the perception that one is now riding a nuclear bomb becomes quite acute.
The Urus SE a big car. A big car with big girth and big tyres and big noises and big turbo whooshes and a big attitude. Its bigness is always noticeable, but not in a clumsy way, unlike many other big things. It serves only to bewilder you at how agile it is.
That’s more than merely from the suspension. The SE is now equipped with a central multi-plate clutch and new e-LSD at the rear axle, using its brain in real time to send power where it helps you best.
Unleash the bull onto the streets, and once you wrap your mind around the discombobulating sensation of 2.5 tonnes of SUV turning on a dime, it is, as you would expect, quite the plus sized ballerina, even in Singapore’s hemmed-in settings.
The car is surprisingly wieldy, despite the giant OBU OBnoxiously OBfuscating your situational awareness into OBlivion. Thanks, LTA.
STILL SPECIAL
That said, the giant tyres, dynamic sophistication, and silicon-powered wizardry mean the car’s sky-high dynamic limits are utterly out of reach on a public road, so it is not possible to drive it in any other way but point-and-shoot. You just aim, enjoy the explosion, and repeat.
The whole experience is terrifyingly hilarious and hilariously terrifying. In 2025, speed has arguably been democratised to the point of being unremarkable. Character and personality, though, remain the invaluable preserve of those who have it, and the Urus SE has it in massive bucketloads.
The hybridisation of the bull may have been a result of a need to meet emissions regulations, but the new ingredient blends perfectly into what remains a medley of truly invigorating parts in a recipe still headlined by the mesmerising V8.
Lamborghini Urus SE 4.0 (A)
ENGINE 3996cc, 32-valves, V8, twin-turbocharged, plug-in hybrid
TOTAL SYSTEM POWER 789hp at 6000rpm
MAX ENGINE TORQUE 800Nm at 2250-4500rpm
POWER TO WEIGHT 315hp per tonne
GEARBOX 8-speed automatic with manual select
0-100KM/H 3.4 seconds
TOP SPEED 312km/h
CONSUMPTION 17.5km/L (combined)
PRICE EXCL. COE On application
AGENT EuroSports Auto
