It was the end of the road for an Italian icon earlier this week as production of Lamborghini Gallardo, one of the most stylish and iconic super-cars of our times, ended in the company’s Sant’Agata Bolognese facility.
The Gallardo rose to fame at the 2003 Geneva Motor Show, an year that marked the 40th anniversary of Lamborghini. While the design and styling stunned audiences at the motor show, the exceptional handling, amazing all-wheel-drive system and the insane power from its 10-cylinder engine impressed critics and experts on the road. Apart from the regular Gallardo and Spyder variants, Lamborghini kept tingling at the hearts of automotive enthusiasts around the world with a range of performance variants and special editions in regular intervals. In case you hadn’t noticed, there was one for India too. Of all such variants, the Gallardo Polizia Stradale that still serves the Italian State Police became a global desktop sensation with its iconic blue and white livery.
It is no wonder then that the Gallardo is, by far, ‘the most successful’ Lamborghini ever. In its 10 year run from 2003 to 2013, production of Gallardo has totaled 14022 units, a truly remarkable feat for a super-car. To put that into the right perspective, the total number of Gallardos is almost half of the 30000 cars that the famous Italian marque has produced since it was first founded in 1963.
The last Gallardo to roll off the line was a LP 570-4 Spyder Performante in Rosso Mars (that’s called red in our parlance). Headed to an undisclosed private collector, the spec-sheet of the final Gallardo read 5.2-liter displacement, V10 configuration, 570 horsepower, 324 km/h top speed, 0 to 100 km/h in 3.9 seconds and a permanent 4-wheel drive system.
As the Gallardo fades into sunset in the year of Lamborghini's 50th anniversary after sharing the factory space with two of the brand's 12-cylinder super-cars in Murcielago and Aventador, teasers of its successor are already out in the world wide web. However good its replacement is though, the Gallardo will be terribly missed.
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