I drove a $250,000 Lamborghini Urus to see if the radical SUV lives up to the hype — here's the verdict

The Lamborghini Urus is, according to the Italian automaker, the world's first “super sport utility vehicle.”

Our tester cost $250,000, it was well optioned, and was outfitted in a bonkers yellow paint job. In other words, it was very much a Lamborghini.

The Urus is, however, surprisingly versatile.

In the end, I decided that Lamborghini did a fantastic job with a design that would have been easy to screw up.

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For decades, the names Ferrari and Lamborghini meant sexy, sleek, powerful Italian sports cars — supercars, and later, hypercars. Expensive dream machines.

Of course, the business model for cars that start at $200,000 and keep going until you hit a million or more is ... limited. Until recently, Ferrari built only about 7,000 road cars per year. Lamborghini built less.

Lamborghini was particularly limited, with just the Huracán supercar and the Aventador super-hypercar in its lineup. In this day and age, it made no sense for Lambo to do a grand tourer or a sedan, so instead, we got a “super sport utility vehicle” — a Lambofied SUV that was announced a few years back.

It hit the market last year, but we didn't get a crack at it until early 2019. We're no strangers to Lambos, having driven various iterations of the Huracán and the Aventador. Personally, after I saw photos of the Urus when it was revealed, I was impressed. It looked crazy cool, like a true SUV supercar.

But would it be a real Lamborghini？ On that score I assumed physics would mitigate that Lambo fizz.

I might have been wrong. Read on to find out why:

Photos by Hollis Johnson.