“I want to buy the world’s fastest, expensive, most powerful, and most exquisite soccer mom car,” said no one ever, until Bentley and Volkswagen AG saw that crossover SUVs were so hot, it was time to make the end-all be-all of lifted, elongated, and higher-riding sedan-based “trucks.” So they created the Bentley Bentayga, which is exactly that–the world’s fastest, most powerful, most expensive, most luxurious crossover SUV made.
Check out more news on the Lamborghini Urus.
But Volkswagen AG isn’t done yet with capitalizing the super-crossover SUV market because they own Lamborghini, and Lamborghini’s been known to be working on their first crossover SUV ever as well, called the Urus. And it’s around that time that the Urus is due to fulfill its duties to be the world’s fastest and most powerful SUV ever, meaning it plans to knock the Bentayga off of its pedestal.
This wouldn’t be the first time Volkswagen AG literally goes to war with itself, but nonetheless, it gets more interesting because despite the Bentayga’s superlatives, nobody knows high-performance crossover SUVs like Porsche, with their top-spec Cayenne Turbo S. While it may not be as luxurious as the Bentayga, the money goes into the blistering performance that the Cayenne Turbo S offers, with an equivalent 0-62 time to the Bentayga of 4.1 seconds. Porsche too, is owned by VAG.
That said, the third contender would be the new Urus, which is said to be a “sub-four-second SUV,” according to Motoring.com down yonder.
The Urus will also be lighter than the Bentayga and Cayenne, despite being built on similar platforms. That would be the future Volkswagen Group MLB modular platform, a modified version of the company’s previous PL71 platform that the Cayenne currently rides on. The Bentayga rides on the revised version of that platform while the Urus will share that platform too, but will be reengineered once more for the sake of weight savings.
This means better handling, thanks to the use of carbon fiber and aluminum-intensive integration into the architecture. No official weight projection figure was provided, but for points of reference, the Bentayga weighs about 5,340lbs as it stands, while the Porsche Cayenne significantly under cuts that by weighing in at a not-so-porky 4,927lbs. Either the way, the Urus is said to be lighter than both of those.
Power? It’ll get a reworked version of Audi’s twin-turbocharged 4.0L V8, which will get a specific tune for its application in the Urus. Again, no official figures provided, but estimations hover around 600hp and 664 lb-ft of twist overall.
The production model is slated to end up at Geneva in 2018, maintaining the concept’s looks aesthetically, with some minor changes to adapt for safety and federal reasons.
The V8 won’t also be the only model, but it will be the debuting version. A plug-in hybrid V6 could join the lineup later on.
– By: Chris Chin
Source: Motoring.com
Source: egmCarTech http://bit.ly/1Vt47jA