Here’s A Look At Yet Another Forgotten Lamborghini

Continuing on the theme of forgotten Lamborghini’s, here’s yet another one that you might not even have heard of - the Lamborghini Canto designed by Zagato. The oddball concept, which was originally conceived in 1998, was meant to be the successor to the iconic Diablo, which was approaching its 10th anniversary. Lamborghini even announced that it would produce 400 units of the supercar, with all of them featuring a rear-wheel drive layout at an estimated cost of $250,000. Sadly, after the Italian supercar manufacturer was taken over by Audi, it’s then-chairman, Ferdinand Piech, criticised the car’s design for not being as aggressive as the Countach or Miura that came before it.

Yes, it did have all the quintessential features that make a V12-powered Lamborghini such as the scissor doors and steeply raked windscreen. However, it was deemed to be too soft for a Lamborghini. This led the company to scrap the project altogether. While the design may have been soft and not worthy of the ‘Raging Bull’ badge, you have to admit that it is still a pretty-looking supercar in its own right.

Among other things, Piech found the massive rear air intakes ugly. Lamborghini tried to rectify this problem by redesigning the car with smaller intakes and promised that it would showcase the car at the 1999 Geneva Motor Show. Alas, even the redesigned version couldn’t make the bossman happy. However, Lamborghini went ahead and built five prototypes of the Canto, of which one was a working prototype, which was later sold to a collector who had it shipped to Japan.

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The test mules of the Canto, which were spied at the Nardo circuit in Italy, featured the Lamborghini Diablo SV’s 510PS V12 engine. Later, the engineers swapped this motor for the more powerful one from the SV-R. This prototype featured a 6.0-litre V12 engine mated to a 6-speed manual gearbox and had a claimed top speed in excess of 350kmph! And although it put out close to 640PS during the testing phase, Lamborghini mentioned that it would detune the engine to 610PS so that it would have the same maintenance schedule as the Diablo.

With the project being scrapped, Lamborghini continued selling the Diablo up until 2001, when it finally made way for the much-loved Murcielago. Fast forward seventeen years, and you'll be forgiven for thinking that it was infact a good thing that the Canto never made it to production. If it did, we'd probably never have had the razor sharp Lamborghini's of today such as the Aventador and the Reventon.