Lamborghini reveals its ultimate 4x4

 Lamborghini Urus.

It’s been more than 30 years in the waiting but today Lamborghini has finally pulled the covers off a new high-performance SUV.

The Lamborghini Urus follows in the footsteps of the 1986 LM002, and the Italian exotic car maker has dropped a colossally powerful engine into a 4x4 to create an offroad family vehicle that will be able to blitz just about everything that comes into its path.

Revealed in Italy today, the Urus uses a 4.0-litre twin-turbocharged V8 engine packing 641bhp and will cost £157,800 or $200,000 before tax.

Lamborghini's 'Super SUV': This is the new Urus - the first 4x4 from the exotic Italian car maker in 31 years

If you want to fit a child car seat – and why not, considering this is an SUV – Lamborghini has kitted the car out with Isofix mounting points in the back. Meanwhile, it says the boot has a capacity of 616 litres, which is more than a Skoda Octavia and should be easily able to swallow a pushchair and the shopping.

While some car fans may consider an Lamborghini SUV to be sacrilege, the Italian car maker is the latest in a line of premium manufacturers catering for what their deep-pocketed customers want.

Porsche's SUV range now consists of two models - the Cayenne and Macan - as does Jaguar's - the F-Pace and E-Pace - while Bentley has also released its £162,700 Bentayga offroader.

Even Rolls-Royce has a 4x4 in development called the Cullinan and Aston Martin promises the DBX in 2020.

Lamborghini said the Urus will take the market even further, though, and ‘create a new niche in the luxury segment’ offering ‘benchmarking power, performance and driving dynamics, unparalleled design, luxury and daily usability’.

In a sign of the times, the Urus offers a 4x4 with the kind of power and performance once only found at the top of the supercar tree.

It’s certainly not short of potency, with the new V8 engine packing more brake horsepower than the V12 powering the McLaren F1 – which is still the fastest naturally-aspirated production car of all time.

The addition of two turbos to the Urus’ V8 engine – which is taken from the Bentley Continental GT and Audi RS6 –and four wheel drive means it will launch from a standstill to 62mph in no less than 3.6 seconds – that’s quicker than a Ferrari F40 and F50 and fast enough to embarrass Aston Martin’s V12 DB11 in a sprint.

The extreme design features styling cues from a range of models, such as the hexagonal wheel arches that replicate those on the 1986 LM002

Lamborghini says the new Urus takes inspiration from its original SUV, the LM002, which launched in 1986. Just 328 were built before production came to an end in 1993.