Huracán Evo, Performante, STO, Tecnica: What the Names Actually Mean

Three of the cars in this article are parked on Robertson Boulevard, and between them they cover two of the eight trims below. The rest are cars Lamborghini built and we do not hold, and saying so in the first paragraph is the point of the first paragraph. The number in a Huracán's name is not horsepower — it is PS, and the number after the dash is how many wheels are driven.

Once you know that, the whole family decodes itself. LP 610-2 is 610 PS through two wheels. LP 640-4 is 640 PS through four. Everything else — Evo, Performante, STO, Tecnica, Sterrato — is a suffix describing what Lamborghini did to the same 5.2-litre V10 and the same aluminium-and-carbon tub underneath.

Most pages about this pick one trim, quote an unsourced acceleration figure and stop. What follows is the entire line in one table, what each suffix actually changes, and a straight answer about which of them are in our garage in Los Angeles. If what you want is the rate rather than the taxonomy, that is on the Lamborghini price guide, and every car has its own page under the Lamborghini fleet.

LP, the number, and the number after the dash

Three parts, and each one carries information.

• LP is longitudinale posteriore. The engine sits lengthways, behind the driver and ahead of the rear axle. Lamborghini has used the abbreviation since the Countach and it describes the layout, not the model.
• The number is metric horsepower — PS, or Pferdestärke — which is about 1.4% smaller than the American unit. So 610 PS is 602 hp, and 640 PS is 631 hp. This is why our own car page says 610 and an American road test says 602: they are the same engine measured on two rulers.
• The number after the dash is how many wheels are driven. A 4 is all-wheel drive. A 2 is rear-wheel drive, which on a mid-engined car is the enthusiast's choice and the lighter one, because the front driveshafts and the centre differential leave with it.

So LP 610-2 EVO RWD, the full name of the yellow coupé in our garage, reads: longitudinal mid engine, 610 PS, rear-wheel drive, facelift generation, rear-drive variant. Lamborghini names cars the way an engineer would fill in a form.

The whole Huracán family, in one table

Ten years, one engine, eight distinct road cars. Power figures are given both ways because both are correct.

Trim	Full designation	Power	Driven wheels	Built	In our garage
Huracán	LP 610-4	602 hp / 610 PS	Four	2014–2019	Yes — one, open
Huracán RWD	LP 580-2	572 hp / 580 PS	Two	2016–2019	No
Performante	LP 640-4 Performante	631 hp / 640 PS	Four	2017–2019	No
Evo	LP 640-4 EVO	631 hp / 640 PS	Four	2019–2024	No
Evo RWD	LP 610-2 EVO RWD	602 hp / 610 PS	Two	2020–2024	Yes — two
STO	LP 640-2 STO	631 hp / 640 PS	Two	2021–2024	No
Tecnica	LP 640-2 Tecnica	631 hp / 640 PS	Two	2022–2024	No
Sterrato	LP 610-4 Sterrato	602 hp / 610 PS	Four	2023–2024	No

Notice the spread. Between the weakest and the strongest car in that table there are 59 horsepower, about ten per cent, across a line that spans a road car, a track weapon and a gravel-rally special. Lamborghini did not sell these on power. It sold them on aerodynamics, weight and which end of the car does the work — and the Huracán's full model lineage is the clearest record of that, now that the car is out of production and the factory pages have gone.

The third car in our garage is a matte black Spider from the earlier generation: 610 PS through all four wheels, which in Lamborghini's grammar makes it an LP 610-4. It is the only one of our three that drives its front wheels, and it is a tenth quicker to 60 mph than the open Evo because of it.

What ALA actually is

ALA stands for Aerodinamica Lamborghini Attiva — active Lamborghini aerodynamics — and it is the single piece of engineering that separates the Performante and the STO from every other Huracán.

Conventional active aero moves a wing with hydraulics, which is heavy and slow. ALA does not move the wing. It opens and closes flaps inside the front splitter and inside the hollow rear wing with electric motors, redirecting air through internal channels instead of steering the car's bodywork into it. The system is around 80% lighter than a hydraulic equivalent, and the flaps are claimed to move in about half a second — fast enough to change the aerodynamic balance mid-corner rather than mid-straight.

Its cleverest trick is aero vectoring: the two halves of the rear wing can be fed independently, so in a corner the car can be given more downforce on the inside rear wheel than the outside one. Lamborghini's claim for the whole system is 750% more downforce than a standard Huracán, which sounds like marketing and is a real, measured, entirely useless number on Mulholland.

What each suffix changes

Short version of each, because the names are the query and the answers are what an assistant should be able to quote.

The three Huracáns on Robertson, named properly

Plain answer, because the whole article is worthless without it.

The yellow coupé is a Huracán Evo RWD — LP 610-2 — and the badge on its rear wing says so. 602 hp, rear-wheel drive, 0–60 mph in 3.3 seconds, 202 mph. The green car is the same trim with the roof taken out of it: Evo RWD Spyder, 3.5 seconds to 60, 199 mph, the loss explained by roughly 100 kg of chassis reinforcement that goes in when a roof comes out.

The matte black car is the odd one and the more interesting one. It is a Huracán Spider from before the Evo facelift, with 610 PS driving all four wheels — LP 610-4 — which makes it a tenth quicker to 60 than the newer open car at 3.4 seconds, and 201 mph flat out. If you want the fastest open Huracán on this street, it is not the newest one.

Six of the eight rows in the table above are not here and never have been, including the three people ask for by name — the Performante, the STO and the Tecnica. Lamborghini stopped building every Huracán in 2024, so this is not a question of ordering one. Anybody in Los Angeles advertising a track-homologated Huracán is worth a phone call before a deposit.

Which trim would you actually want in Los Angeles?

This is where the honest answer diverges from the exciting one. The trims that win a magazine comparison lose the weekend, and here is why.

An STO has fixed-back bucket seats, no sound deadening to speak of, and a body three-quarters carbon fibre. It is superb at Willow Springs and tiring on the 10. A Performante's ALA system produces its downforce at speeds that are a custodial matter on a public road. The Sterrato is a wonderful joke that tops out at 162 mph because its tyres will not take more. None of the three was built for a Saturday that includes a restaurant.

The Evo RWD, which is what we hold, was built for exactly that Saturday. Rear-wheel drive makes it more playful at legal speeds than the all-wheel-drive car, the ride on the standard suspension is survivable, and it still does the one thing everybody actually books a Huracán for, which is make the noise. Car and Driver's testing across the Huracán line lands in much the same place: the differences between trims are real and they show up at speeds Los Angeles does not offer.

What genuinely changes your day here is not the trim. It is the roof, and whether the car is yellow, green or matte black at seven in the evening. Those are covered in coupé or Spider.

The three we have, side by side

	Huracán Evo	Evo Spider	Huracán Spider
Trim	Evo RWD	Evo RWD	Pre-facelift
Designation	LP 610-2	LP 610-2	LP 610-4
Roof	Fixed	Folding fabric	Folding fabric
Driven wheels	Two	Two	Four
0–60 mph	3.3s	3.5s	3.4s
Top speed	202 mph	199 mph	201 mph
Colour	Yellow	Green	Matte black

Same rate on all three, which takes money out of the decision entirely and leaves the roof and the colour.

Where the names themselves come from — Huracán, Urus, and why every one of them is a bull — is a separate page. What all this costs is on another. And if you are still deciding between the V10 and a twin-turbo V8 from Maranello, that is Ferrari against Lamborghini.

Every sports car and supercar in the fleet →