Lamborghini LM002 SUV revisited

There’s something deeply sinister about the sight of a Lamborghini LM002 rolling to a stop at a petrol pump.

As if the angry rasp and spit of its old-school V12 engine weren’t foreboding enough to make you recoil, the car’s incredible bulk and science-fiction-mutant styling certainly will – in protection of your internal organs, mainly. In situ at the trough, spluttering away at idle, with superminis and family hatches fleeing in all directions, this thing looks like a cuckoo chick in a robin’s nest: fat, noisy, wild for a feed.

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Owner Jane Weitzmann has already fuelled it once this morning, but there’s still room for £100 of premium unleaded without any sign of it approaching the neck of the tank. It’s quite a tank: 290 litres, 64 imperial gallons, a £400 fill. There must be petrol stations with less capacity. And that’ll last you just 500 miles in an LM002 – if you drive like a night-shift private hire hero with an unusual fixation for coasting. Today, given the opportunity to drive one of the automotive sphere’s most intriguing curios, I’m not planning on doing that.

This opportunity is something I never should have had – not on the road, at least, and not without 14 weeks’ training by the Royal Armoured Corps. Because the LM002 was a military project gone wrong. Really, it was designed to wear three-inch plating and roar across war-torn terrain with a machine gun bolted to the roof. It just so happened that, by the early 1980s, neither Ronald Reagan nor Muammar Gaddafi was inclined 
to put in a bulk order, the US preferring the even bigger and more butch Humvee. And so Lamborghini bosses the Mimran brothers, who had taken control of the company while it was in receivership and were desperate for pragmatic routes to recovery, turned the failed army special into a road car.

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The LM002 had an eventful gestation. Originally dubbed the Cheetah, earliest versions were powered by a rear-mounted V8 engine whose location resulted in a weight distribution so problematic that it caused the US army to inadvertently roll its only prototype into a very small, very heavy ball – or so the story goes. The car was also the subject of a legal action by the US’s FMC corporation, which believed it to be a carbon copy of its XR311 – another would-be military vehicle. Combined, the two controversies led Lamborghini to abandon the rear-mounted V8 for a front-mounted V12 and pretty effectively killed its hopes of making a success of the Cheetah as a specialist forces machine.

By 1986, however – fitted out with wood and leather and as many in-car gadgets as the world really knew about at the time – the ‘civvie’ LM002 was launched. It had a 444bhp 5.2-litre Countach engine, a tubular steel spaceframe and all-independent suspension. Its Pirelli Scorpion tyres were designed to support the car’s 2.7 tonnes when almost flat. It could crack 60mph in less than eight seconds. At the time it must have seemed less like a normal 4x4 than an extra-terrestrial planetary exploration buggy from a comic book.