Model featured:

Lamborghini Gallardo

The Lamborghini Gallardo is Lamborghini's "entry-level" car, sitting beneath the Murciélago. 3,000 Gallardos were built in just two years, making it the company's most-produced model to date. The second-place Diablo took a decade to sell 2,903 examples.

The Gallardo was designed as a competitor to Ferrari's 360 Modena, and now competes with its replacement, the F430. The car is named after a famous breed of fighting bull and is pronounced roughly "gah-yar-do". Gallardo is also Spanish for the word gallant. Although performance is lower than the Murcielago, it is still very high, and the Gallardo has much better rearward visibility and, according to reviewers, is more manoeuverable as well as more tractable in low-speed traffic, making the Gallardo a much more practical car to drive. It is also much more practical to use in bad weather than other supercars, thanks to rear-biased all-wheel drive. Although corporate owner Audi is renowned for its extremely good Quattro AWD system, Lamborghini uses a system of its own.

However, to the disappointment of many enthusiasts, Lamborghini did not fit its signature scissor-doors as on the Murcielago - this is reserved for V12 models and the Gallardo is a V10 - and many owners have fitted their own vertical-opening doors.

The Gallardo uses a V10 engine based on Audi's old straight-5 design. This engine was split again to become the straight-5 engine found in the new Volkswagen Jetta. The 5.0-litre engine is a current Audi 4.2-liter V8 (featured in Audi's S4, A6, A8, and upcoming Q7 models) with two extra cylinders added and a slightly smaller bore diameter.

The Gallardo offers two choices of transmissions, a conventional six-speed manual transmission, and an advanced six-speed electro-hydraulically controlled auto-clutch manual, or, as Lamborghini refers to it "E-gear". This allows the driver to make shifts much faster than an automatic transmission would, with the control that a manual offers. The driver shifts up and down via paddles behind the steering wheel, and does not need to manually actuate the clutch.
Audi, Lamborghini's current owner, plans to offer its own sports car based on the Gallardo architecture, the Audi R8. It would use a V8 in place of the Gallardo's V10 to avoid competing directly with the sister car.

Performance

1. power: 500bhp
2. top speed: 309kmh
3. 0-100 kmh: unknown

Engine

1. capacity: 4961cc
2. cylinders: 10
3. configuration: V10

Other

1. production dates: 2003-
2. total produced: 3500+ to date
3. variants: Spyder;S