Today Lamborghini is debuting its newest sports car model, the Temerario. Like its extravagantly flashy predecessors, the Temerario is a shameless, look-at-me car. It’s got a signature Lamborghini form factor of sharp edges, a shark-nose front, and a super low-profile silhouette available in 400 colors, and it’s stuffed with the automotive excess of a 10,000-RPM twin-turbo V8 engine boosted with three electric motors.
But for all its Fast and Furious details, the coolest design feature of the Lamborghini Temerario is its daytime running headlights.
Lamborghini’s wild hexagonal headlights
In what is likely a first for the automotive industry, the hexagonal shaped LED headlights are hollow in the center, allowing them to also serve as an air intake to ventilate the high-performance powertrain. “There is an airstream that is going through the hexagon,” says Lamborghini design director Mitja Borkert. “Knowing that there will be this fascinating powertrain inside, of course we wanted to have the design fitting perfectly to it in terms of excitement.”
The Lamborghini Temerario’s headlights are part of a trend of car headlights taking wild and inventive new forms. The holes in the headlights pour air into the radiator and engine compartment, and air channels below the headlights direct air to chill the braking system. But the airstreams do more than just cool the vehicle. They’re also part of its aerodynamic design.
Borkert calls the hollow centered lights “one of the biggest challenges for aerodynamicists due to the positioning in front of the radiators.” The shape and form of the lights and the holes inside them had to be finely tuned to function as both ventilation and a seamless part of the sports car’s air slicing design. “Every single detail was optimized with design reaching the innovative shape, the best inclination of surfaces and the additional hole in the middle guarantee the best cooling performance [while] acting like an aerodynamic surface,” says Borkert. Specially designed wings at the outlet of the radiators direct the headlights’ airflow to the wheel housings, taking the air that’s sucked into the car and spitting it out without noticeable drag. Deciding to add this novel hole in the headlights required more work to design how air flowed through the innards of the car, but the overall effect is more ventilation and less air resistance. “It is our philosophy that the lights are always part of the aerodynamic concept of the cars,” Borkert says.
The hexagonal shape of the lights is also a reference to Lamborghini history. Borkert says the hexagon has appeared in Lamborghini cars since the 1960s, and it’s intended to be the Temerario’s visual signature. It recurs throughout the car’s design, in its body work, its side air intakes, its taillights, and its exhaust pipes. But for those who know to look, the most important placement of this visual signature will be hiding in the empty space inside those headlights.