Would suit:
"Big Brother" rejects, attention seekers.
Price:
£121 000 (about R1.4-million).
Maximum speed:
300km/h+, 0-100km/h 4.3sec.
Combined fuel consumption:
19.56 litres/100km..
Although I realise that this is missing the point by quite a conspicuous margin, for me the most compelling aspect of driving a Lamborghini Gallardo on public roads is the way other people react.
On a track, where the the "baby" Lamborghini's four-wheel-drive system could unleash its catapulting thrust without fear of catastrophe, I imagine it would be more invigorating than the naughty bits of BBC Two's Rome.
This is, essentially, an air-conditioned racing car. It looks like something Bruce Wayne might knock together in his spare time, and has a brutal 492bhp, V10 engine mounted just behind the driver's head.
Better still, German people oversee its construction which means that, unlike Lamborghinis of the past, it won't spend 90 per cent of its life up on a ramp as a ferrety man in an oil-stained romper suit makes expensive sucking noises with his teeth (although, the tragic payoff is that this also means it looks and feels like a sexed-up Audi inside).
And, for £117 000 you get a car that is a mere half a second slower to 100km/h and only 13km/h slower overall, than its big brother, the Murciélago, which costs over £50 000 more (a convertible version of the Gallardo was recently unveiled at the Frankfurt auto show for sale early in 2006; and a limited-edition, two-tone SE version is on sale now for £132 000).
The Gallardo is one of the greatest sports cars in the world right now but, as with just about all the other greatest sports cars in the world, it is a fairly grim prospect on public roads.
You can't see much other than a small patch of the road immediately in front of you; you can see nothing to the rear and precious little to the sides; you can't really park it on the street for fear that someone will take offence; the suspension will pound your rump into tartare within a couple of miles and everybody will assume you kick a bladder of air around for a living.
The noise the engine makes may be collywobblingly, gut-wrenchingly thrilling (all the old clichés apply - ripping calico in a tin bucket, the cry of a wounded leopard, Axl Rose at the dentist) but it doesn't half get wearing when you only want to potter down to the local video shop to pick up a movie.
We've all daydreamed about swanning into the boss's parking space in a car like this but I suspect, in reality, few of us would really want the sound track to our lives to be a highly strung V10.
And who could live with the attention? Wherever I went in the Gallardo (pronounced "gay-ardo", it comes, as with all Lambo names, from a fighting bull) I was stared, pointed and gaped at.
All too much...
People crossing the road in front of me would stop midway and make as if they'd seen a triffid; small boys would grab their mates' phones to take pictures; and white van men would yell witty bons mots ("I've got two of them", "Bring it back when you've finished with it", and, of course, "Prat!") as they passed.
It was all too much for me. I took to driving it only after dark, out of town, which rather defeats the object of owning such a peacock's tail of a car.
I do have a better suggestion for how a Gallardo might best be used: "Big Brother" rejects struggling to cope with normal life should be given one for a week as a kind of mobile attention-generating decompression chamber.
They could then tool around city centres being pointed and leered at. After a week even they would be sated. - The Independent, London