What Lamborghini Model Names Mean: Bulls, an Ox, and the Four That Broke the Rule

Name	Figure	What kind of number that is
The ranch visit	1962	Don Eduardo Miura’s estate near Seville, a year before the company.
Automobili Lamborghini	7 May 1963	Founded in Sant’Agata Bolognese by a tractor manufacturer born under Taurus.
Huracán	1879	The year the bull fought. Also the Spanish for hurricane.
Urus	1627	The year the last aurochs died, in a Polish forest.
Names that are not bulls	4	Countach, Silhouette, LM002, Sián. Two more sit just outside the rule.
In the garage	2 names	The Urus and the Huracán, on the same street.

The ox Lamborghini Urus Named for an animal that stood six feet at the shoulder and has been extinct since 1627. It seats five and takes a weekend of luggage, which is more than any of the bulls can say. Dates and rate →

The ranch outside Seville

In 1962 a tractor manufacturer from Emilia-Romagna drove to a ranch outside Seville to look at fighting bulls. He left with a badge, a naming convention, and sixty years of car names nobody outside Spain can pronounce.

Ferruccio Lamborghini made his money after the war rebuilding surplus military machinery into tractors, then building his own. He founded Automobili Lamborghini on 7 May 1963 in Sant’Agata Bolognese, and the factory’s own history dates the emblem to the same year. He was born on 28 April 1916, which makes him a Taurus, and he had a serious interest in bullfighting before he had a car company.

The visit to Don Eduardo Miura, whose line of fighting bulls is the most feared in Spain, settled two things at once: the crest, a bull mid-charge, and the naming policy. It also produced the most literal name in the catalogue. When Lamborghini built the mid-engined car that changed the industry in 1966 he named it after the breeder himself, and the fourth one built was shown to Don Eduardo at his ranch. The older argument, the one with Maranello in it, is Ferrari against Lamborghini; this page is the names, and two of them have number plates in our Lamborghini garage.

Every name, and what it means

Name	What it means
Miura	Not a bull but the breeder. Don Eduardo Miura, whose Seville ranch Ferruccio visited in 1962.
Espada	Spanish for the sword, and by extension the man holding it. A four-seat V12 named after the instrument of the kill.
Islero	The Miura bull that killed the matador Manolete at Linares in 1947, the most famous death in twentieth-century bullfighting.
Jarama	A historic bullfighting region. Ferruccio worried it would be mistaken for the racing circuit, and he was right.
Urraco	A breed of fighting bull. The first attempt at a smaller, cheaper Lamborghini.
Countach	Not a bull. Contacc is a Piedmontese expletive, roughly an astonished “good grief”.
Jalpa	Another bull breed, and the last small Lamborghini for twenty years.
Diablo	The Duke of Veragua’s bull, famous for an epic fight against El Chicorro in Madrid in 1869.
Murciélago	The bull whose life was spared by El Lagartijo in 1879 for its courage in the ring. Also the Spanish for bat.
Gallardo	One of the five ancestral castes of the Spanish fighting bull. A bloodline, not one animal.
Reventón	The bull that defeated the young Mexican torero Félix Guzmán in 1943.
Aventador	A fighting bull, and the V12 that followed the Murciélago.
Huracán	The Spanish for hurricane, borrowed from a Caribbean storm god, and a bull known for its courage that fought in 1879.
Centenario	Not a bull. The hundredth anniversary of Ferruccio’s birth in 1916.
Urus	Not a bull either, and older than all of them. See below.
Sián	Not a bull. Bolognese dialect for a flash of lightning, the factory’s own accent rather than a Spanish word.
Revuelto	A fighting bull, and the V12 that followed the Aventador.
Temerario	A fighting bull. The word means reckless or daring, and it is what came after the Huracán.

Two patterns fall out of that list. The exceptions arrive in bursts — three of them in the twelve years after 1974, then none at all for thirty. And the bull names get less specific as they go: the Islero and the Murciélago are individual animals with dates attached, the later names are, more loosely, fighting bulls. Sixty years of this will exhaust any register. Wikipedia’s account of the nomenclature keeps the record of which name came from which animal, which matters because the factory’s own pages disappear when a model does.

Urus is not a bull. It is an ox, and it is extinct

This is the entry people get wrong most often, and the one worth knowing. The urus, more usually called the aurochs, is the wild ox from which every domestic cow on earth descends. It stood about six feet at the shoulder, ranged across Europe, Asia and North Africa, and the last known individual died in a Polish forest in 1627. The Latin word urus was used for the animal from the Gallic Wars onwards, which is to say Julius Caesar wrote about it. The nameplate’s derivation is exactly that: not a fighting bull in a ring but the ancestor of all of them.

Which is a better name for the car than the tradition would have produced. A Urus is not a supercar with a spoiler; it is the animal all the others came from, adapted to carry five people and their luggage. Whoever chose it was paying attention. Against the other super-SUVs at this end of the market, the Urus is measured in Urus vs Bentayga vs G 63.

The ones that broke the rule

Every naming convention needs its exceptions and Lamborghini’s are all defensible. Countach, 1974, is the most famous break: contacc is Piedmontese, mildly rude, and roughly what you say when something astonishing happens in front of you. Nuccio Bertone is supposed to have said it when the prototype rolled out of the workshop, and Lamborghini kept it, which tells you a great deal about the company in 1974. Silhouette, 1976, took the name of a racing category rather than an animal, a short-lived car and the most forgettable name in the list, which are probably related facts.

LM002, 1986, is LM for a military project rather than a bull: a V12 off-roader built for a contract that never arrived, and the direct ancestor of the idea that produced the Urus thirty years later. Sián, 2019, is Bolognese dialect for a flash of lightning, a local word rather than a Spanish one for the first hybrid the company built; Sant’Agata naming a car in its own accent is a small piece of self-confidence. Two more sit outside the tradition without quite breaking it: the Centenario is an anniversary rather than an animal, and the Urus, which everyone assumes is a bull, is not one.

Two names out of eighteen, on one street

The Urus is the extinct wild ox and it is the five-seat super-SUV. The Huracán is the 1879 bull and it is the two-seat V10, as a coupé and as an open car. If you have settled on the Huracán, the next decision is the roof, and coupé or Spider settles it.

What it costs, and how it reaches you

The Urus carries a $1,500 refundable deposit and every Huracán $2,000, both held on the primary driver’s card rather than charged and back 5–7 business days after the car returns. The Protection plan is priced per day off the deposit band, and every Lamborghini here sits in the top one; your own qualifying policy works instead. The live figures and the calendars are on the Lamborghini page; what the rest of the bill is made of is set out line by line.

Collection from our lot on Robertson Boulevard is free and delivery to the partner hotels in Beverly Hills is complimentary. Airport delivery is $150 both ways standard, where the car waits in the airport parking structure and you take the shuttle out to it, or $300 both ways VIP, where it is at the terminal when you walk out — half that for one direction. The shuttle is half an hour with luggage, which the ox carries and the bull does not, so the VIP tier earns its money on a Huracán more than on a Urus. Under twenty-five there is a young-driver fee per day, the higher of the two we charge. Mileage, fuel and the rest are in the terms.