NEW YORK CITY is probably not on top of anyone?s list of best places to drive a 190-m.p.h. Italian supercar. But trust me: the combination of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and the Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera is an underground under-the-radar thrill. The tunnel, which connects Brooklyn and Manhattan below New York Harbor, proved the perfect concert hall for the Gallardo?s 10 soaring cylinders. As I fired its bellicose engine to 8,000 r.p.m., the Gallardo convinced me ? and other drivers, judging by the startled expressions ? that we had entered a Michael Bay movie in which a runaway F-16 was strafing its way down the tunnel. If it?s hard for you to put a price tag on that kind of entertainment, allow Lamborghini to do so: That will be $224,800 to start for this lighter, faster, more expensive version of the regular $199,900 Gallardo. (The V-8 powered Audi R8, which shares the Lambo?s aluminum space frame, all-wheel-drive system and midengine layout, is a relative bargain, starting at $118,000).Driving any Lamborghini, whose interstellar styling never fades into the background, is a handy Rorschach test: Onlookers either melt into beatific puddles at first sight, or they studiously ignore the car while dismissing its driver as a cologne-dipped jackass. (When it?s you in the driver?s seat, those in the second group are clearly just jealous.)Compared with the standard Gallardo, the Superleggera ? or super light ? follows the carbon-fiber diet to shed 154 pounds. The weight-saving material is used for the seats, inner door panels, exterior mirrors, underbody cover, rear spoiler, engine hatch cover and more. Lamborghini claims a weight of 2,998 pounds, though Car and Driver found it topped 3,400, heavier than a Corvette or Porsche 911.Still, the V-10 had no trouble hurtling the Gallardo to 60 miles an hour in 3.5 seconds and to 100 m.p.h. in 7.9 seconds in Car and Driver?s testing. It clocked the quarter-mile in 11.7 seconds, by which time it was traveling 123 m.p.h., and sparking fits of giggles. Inside the lovely hand-built cabin, seemingly every surface is swaddled in Alcantara suede, including the form-fitting seats. The navigation and climate controls are familiar Audi gear, which means they work better than those on any Italian car in memory.It?s a bit tricky to climb in or out, via conventional portals rather than the scissor-action doors of the Murciélago, Lamborghini?s top model. There?s a duffel-size front trunk that holds a six-CD player hostage, and a stingy view out the back. But otherwise, the Gallardo is the most livable, accommodating Lamborghini ever, enough that a hard-core owner who has no nagging spinal issues could consider driving one every day. In one example, a clever console switch raises the Gallardo?s pavement-sniffing nose at low speeds to keep it from grinding on every gas-station driveway. At the car?s center, the engine is visible under a clear polycarbonate window like a mouth-watering cannoli in a display case. The V-10 is connected to all four 19-inch wheels via what Lamborghini calls the e-gear.This automated manual transmission can be balky, especially in its automatic mode. Hit the sport button on the console and paddle-activated downshifts are accompanied by a thrilling blip of the throttle and a vertebra-snapping gear change (in just two-tenths of a second).Around town, the brakes ? the test car had optional $15,600 carbon-composite rotors ? are fiendishly hard to modulate. They moved from a vague scrubbing of speed to kiss-the-windshield braking in just an inch of pedal travel. I eventually learned to cope with their hair-trigger operation.As the Gallardo escaped the city and roared up the Hudson Valley, the mighty engine, transmission and brakes began to sing in harmony. And if the handling fell just shy of the perfection of, say, a Ferrari F430, the Lamborghini?s personna was appealingly different from its Maranello rival. It is a hairy, lusty King Kong in a designer suit. Its appetite is equally lusty: I recorded 11 m.p.g. Premium-grade guzzling is enabled by an enormous 24-gallon tank, though the balky gauge in my test car never read below three-quarters full.Sure, the Dodge Viper or Corvette Z06 will circle a racecourse just as quickly, and they cost roughly as much as the Gallardo?s floor mats. (Yes, I?m kidding: the floor mats were only $650.) But one?s a Dodge, one?s a Chevy and one?s an Italian exotic. So it all makes sense. At least for the guy selling the Italian exotic. If that salesman needs another hook, he might mention the relative rarity of the supercars from Sant?Agata Bolognese. Last fall, more than 3,000 Ferraris were registered in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut ? but only about 440 Lamborghinis. If you ever want to understand why some people are willing to part with $246,000 for a Lamborghini, one day with a bright-yellow Gallardo Superleggera will make it all clear. People gawp and gape and wind down their windows to mouth the words "wow" and, in the case of spotty teenagers, "sick." Strangers become emboldened to ring your doorbell on a Saturday afternoon and beg for a closer look. Others will tail you home at 11 p.m., like pesky magnets, in pursuit of a closer look at a car that is a common sight only at Lamborghini's plant in Sant'Agata Bolognese in northern Italy and possibly at South Beach in Florida. The Superleggera is the hard-core version of Lambo's entry-level supercar, the Gallardo, trimmed of 126 pounds, thanks to the extensive use of Superman-hard but lightweight carbon fiber. The engine cover, the rear diffuser, the underbody cover, the exterior mirrors, the rear spoiler, the side sills, and the inner door panels are all made of carbon fiber, and some of the glass?the rear window, for one?has been replaced with lighter-weight polycarbonate. Removing 126 pounds from a supercar is a good thing, but bear in mind that the 3434-pound curb weight is hardly light, as declared by the Italian term superleggera ("super light"). While Lamborghini was shedding weight, it added 11 horsepower to the already enormous 512 horsepower that the Gallardo makes from its 5.0-liter V-10 engine. According to Lamborghini, the power increase came from changes to the engine software and a bigger intake manifold. Torque remains at 376 pound-feet, peaking at 4250 rpm. The six-speed e-gear automated manual transmission is a no-cost alternative to the six-speed manual. Lamborghini has fitted the 19-inch wheels with sticky Pirelli P Zero Corsa rubber that is optional on the base Gallardo. The suspension settings are carried over, according to Lamborghini. Carbon-ceramic brakes are an option on the Superleggera and were fitted to our test car for a whopping $15,600. (Porsche charges about $8800 for this type of brake, and Ferrari wants somewhere around $22,000 for carbon rotors on the F430.) In addition to all the carbon-fiber pieces inside and out, the Superleggera gets a number of interior changes, including Alcantara, a synthetic suede, in place of leather on the dashboard. European versions get special lightweight bucket seats, but the U.S.-bound cars have the Gallardo's optional sport seats, which weigh 66 more pounds than the buckets because they have built-in side airbags. The car certainly looks fantastic. The Gallardo may be four years old, but its shape still turns heads almost off their necks. Especially in bright Midas Yellow. Inside, the dark-gray Alcantara is relieved by yellow stitching and motifs that would look gauche in a Corvette but somehow work in a Lambo. The carbon-fiber inserts and inner door panels look terrific, but the numbers on the dials are tricky to read. Unlike Lambos of yore, in which electrical items and the air conditioner had the faithfulness of Wilt Chamberlain, the audio, HVAC, and navigation systems in this car work perfectly. Put that down to corporate overlord Audi's influence. The squared-off steering wheel has a cheesy plastic piece screwed onto its base, but we didn't hear any complaints about the driving position or the visibility from inside this mid-engined car. There certainly weren't any negative comments about the Superleggera's engine. It sounds sensational, the noise building from a rambunctious bellow low down in the rev range to a guttural bark as the tach needle climbs toward the 8000-rpm redline. Like a Ferrari F430, you consciously head for bridges and tunnels with the windows down, just to hear the exhaust note reverb. Flick the left-hand paddle shifter at high revs, and there's an instant blip of soaring engine revs to enhance the effect. The engine is pretty flexible, with plenty of thrust from 3000 rpm up. There's lots of urge in a straight line, too. We recorded a 0-to-60 time of 3.5 seconds, 0.6 second better than the first Gallardo we tested [February 2004], with 0 to 100 mph coming in 7.9 seconds (versus 9.2) and the quarter-mile taking 11.7 seconds at 123 mph (versus 12.4 at 118). Those numbers are right up there with the best we have seen for cars such as the Porsche 911 Turbo, the Corvette Z06, and the latest Dodge Viper.The e-gear transmission has its good and bad points. In automatic mode, the shifts are clunky and never quite happen when you expect them to. If you resort to manual mode, effected by a pair of elegant, fixed paddles on either side of the steering column, it works much better. If smoothness is a goal, avoid sport mode, where shifts are very fast?about 0.2 second each?and brutal enough to jerk your neck back and forth. For drivers desperate to impress bystanders, we recommend a launch-control start. Since the Gallardo was introduced, this procedure has been revised. Now the driver simply puts the car into gear, switches off the stability control, engages the sport mode, releases any pressure on either pedal, and then stomps on the gas. The engine revs to about 5000 rpm, the clutch is dumped, all four wheels spin, and the car departs like a cat on a lighted range. With its soft and sticky Pirellis, we expected better than 0.97 g on the skidpad, especially since that '04 Gallardo had managed 1.00 g. This may have been because of some overly exuberant lapping at GingerMan Raceway the evening before the car was tested, leaving the P Zero Corsas in less than pristine condition. The Superleggera certainly performed well enough on the track, recording lap times comparable with those of a Z06. With its stiffened suspension and improved power-to-weight ratio over the Gallardo, the Superleggera feels like a more finely honed weapon at max attack. The steering is nicely weighted and has plenty of feel (if not as much communication as a Porsche GT3's or Ferrari F430's), and the handling is reasonably idiot-proof. There's initial understeer that mutates into neutrality with the application of power. The car drifts nicely, but you have to provoke it mightily to get the tail sliding with the stability system switched off. On the street, it just cleaves its way through corners. The ride is firm but relatively supple, although expansion joints and potholes crash through the body structure with jack-hammer ferocity. So far, so good. The only problem with the Superleggera came in stopping it. The car manages the 70-mph-to-standstill braking test in a stellar 150 feet, and the anchors work fine on the track. But the brake-pedal feel, at anything other than full retardation, is awful. We can't recall anything with brakes this sensitive, a trait that isn't helped by the clutch seemingly grabbing on downshifts. Virtually all our drivers embarrassingly lurched to a halt at a stoplight, no doubt encouraging other drivers to think uncharitably about their driving prowess. Fuel consumption wasn't exactly a strong point, either, with an overall figure of 12 mpg in our hands. The Superleggera is a sensational car, but it's also hugely expensive at a base price of $224,800, a premium of nearly $30,000 over the base Gallardo. Our test car, optioned with carbon-ceramic brakes, a leather steering wheel ($650), an anti-theft system ($665), floor mats ($650), a navigation system ($3250), and the Travel package ($360), ran to a cool $245,975. It sounds like a lot of extra money over a Gallardo, but a Superleggera is a good $100,000 less than a comparably equipped Murciélago LP640, about as quick in a straight line, and a lot less of a handful on a track. If you look at it that way, it's something of a bargain for Lambo fanciers.

ORIGINS OF A NAME
The literal translation for superleggera is "super light." The term was most widely used by Touring of Milan, an Italian body designer and builder, although its intention was to describe a form of light and rigid body construction where aluminum panels were wrapped around a framework of small-diameter steel tubes. Among the cars fitted with superleggera bodywork were the Aston Martin DB4 and DB5 and the Ferrari 166MM Barchetta.

The Lamborghini Gallardo surprised us in a number of ways, but mostly in terms of its refinement and quality. The Gallardo is a bit intimidating initially, due to its radical styling, its dimensions, the sound of its highly tuned Italian V10, and advanced features such as its available E-gear electronic gearbox. But the Gallardo quickly became our friend and bonded as a teammate, more so than, say, a Viper or even a Corvette. Granted, it has a couple of quirks related to some of its most exotic performance options, but we were impressed with its drivability in traffic and by the ergonomic excellence of its interior. The more time we spent with the Gallardo, the more we came to love and enjoy it. Climbing into the car, we were immediately reminded that Lamborghini is owned by Volkswagen and supervised by Audi. The cabin doesn't exude Audi or German engineering, but the interior is high quality and ergonomically well designed. The materials are handsome and well matched, everything fits together well, nothing rattles, all the controls were in logical, expected locations. Everywhere we looked in the cabin, we saw quality and elegant design. Initially put off, we even grew to like the hard, shiny, carbon fiber door trim in the Gallardo Superleggera. Operating the Gallardo is intuitive, with a traditional ignition key and a traditional hand brake. Some of the latest luxury sedans from Germany are much harder to operate than the Gallardo. At the same time, the Gallardo benefits from the same sophisticated navigation, audio and climate system found in the latest Audi models. The controls are sophisticated yet elegant (meaning simple) and easy to operate. Getting in and out is fairly easy. The seats are roomy and comfortable. Outward visibility is much better than expected. The cabin is quite phenomenal, really, and it makes the Gallardo a joy to drive on a frequent basis. On the outside, the Gallardo benefits from Italian design. It looks exotic and flamboyant. A closer look reveals high-quality construction with body panels awash in quality paint that fit smartly and evenly.Gallardo comes in coupe and roadster versions, plus a lighter, more powerful Superleggera model. We've only driven the latter, but two of us have driven two different cars in two locations, and came up with the same conclusions. As expected, the Superleggera is lightning quick and blindingly fast. It grips the road so well that you'll likely work the tires only on a racing circuit. And it has fantastic braking capability. The acceleration performance is truly exhilarating and at full song in the Sport mode the E-gear changes gears like a race driver in anger. Yet, around town, in the automatic or normal manual modes, it shifts smoothly and is quite tractable at low speeds. It's not as docile as a Porsche 911 Turbo but nor is it a Viper. The biggest driving challenge comes when it's time to park: The corners of the car are not visible, so we were happiest when a spotter was directing us in tight confines. Also, jockeying into a parking spot in tight confines is challenging because the E-gear transmission is depressing and releasing the clutch as you give it little jabs of throttle and the carbon-fiber brakes are grabby when cold. Familiarity and some special driving techniques help, but you may not want to toss the keys to just anyone to park it. Then again, why give the keys to anyone? For that matter, why ever park it?

Model Lineup
The 2008 Lamborghini Gallardo comes in Coupe ($186,250) and Spyder ($217,000) versions. The Superleggera ($222,800) comes only as a coupe. Options for the Superleggera include a stationary rear wing instead of the standard articulated wing that rises and falls with the speed of the car. Also on the options list are eight-piston carbon disc brakes ($10,000), as well as a window net, fire extinguisher, and a bar for competition seat belts. The six-speed manual transmission is a no-cost option. Navigation and entertainment systems are available for the Gallardo, but not the Superleggera. Safety features include seat-mounted side air bags, anti-lock brakes, traction control, electronic stability control, and all-wheel drive.

Walkaround
All Lamborghini Gallardo models are built on an aluminum space frame, with aluminum extruded parts welded to cast aluminum joint sections, and an aluminum body structure with thermoplastic hang-on parts such as fenders and door skins. From the outside, the Superleggera is nearly identical to the standard Gallardo coupe, with the exception of the Superleggera logo on the lower portion of the doors. But the shape hides a whole menu of lightweight parts that come on the Superleggera, including a carbon fiber rear diffuser, carbon fiber outside mirror housings, a carbon fiber driveshaft, a polymer rear window and engine cover instead of glass, carbon fiber intake manifold, lightweight exhaust manifolds, forged aluminum wheels, and titanium wheel nuts, to make the car as light as possible.

Interior Features
Inside, the Superleggera has shiny gray carbon fiber door panels, a carbon fiber dashboard panel and carbon fiber console to save weight. The carbon fiber look is becoming a cliche, but the door panels are handsomely designed and fit well. Best of all, it's easy to clean: Simply wipe it off. The seats in our Gallardo Superleggera were supportive and comfortable. Finished in alcantara with a small dash of body-colored trim, they are very attractive. The seats are equipped with seat-mounted side air bags and three-point seat belts. The driver and passenger can reach all the audio, climate, window and other controls in the center of the dash quite easily and comfortably. Audio and climate controls and the navigation system come from Audi. A seven-inch color screen in the center of the dash displays Audi's Multi-Media Interface, or MMI. A dial surrounded by four buttons are used to control most functions. This system gives the driver control over many functions without filling the dash with buttons. Audi's MMI features a shallower menu structure than BMW's iDrive, so you don't have to burrow as deeply through a maze of menus to get to the adjustment you want. The climate controls are separate, however, and this is a good thing. Heating and air conditioning have more traditional controls mounted below the MMI controller. So you don't have to call up a menu to change the fan speed or cabin temperature. You simply press a button and twist a dial. Between these two interfaces is a set of power window switches. This is the least ergonomic aspect of the cabin controls; you have to actually look at them to raise or lower the windows, less convenient than having the switches on the doors. The sharply angled windshield and the deep dashboard give the feeling that you're sitting far back in the car, and you are, just ahead of the rear window and firewall that separate you physically but not aurally from that fire-breathing, V10 engine. We quickly adjusted to this. Visibility is quite good all around, not as clear as the view from a Porsche 911 Turbo, but far better than that of traditional exotics. For example, we were alert when driving around LAX, one of the world's busiest airports, with shuttle vans, cabs and distracted motorists jostling into neighboring lanes in their efforts to pick people up, but we weren't terrified and would do it again. Big side mirrors offer a good rearward view. The rearview mirror offers a good view; the rear wing on the Superleggera blocks the view a little, and at night it can look like someone behind you is flashing their headlights as the wing obscures and reveals them when the cars bounce around. The biggest issue with visibility comes with parking in tight quarters. The body work falls out of sight up front so it's difficult to judge where the corners of the car are located when pulling into a one-car garage. Fortunately, you are farther from the object than it appears. The Gallardo is wide, so you don't have a lot of space to work with. Exacerbating this are the touchy carbon-fiber brakes and an electronic gearbox depressing and releasing the clutch for a highly tuned V10. We found it very useful to have a spotter, though we were able to do it on our own. Sometimes it helped to push on both pedals at the same time, other times a light touch combined with experience with the E-gear was best. Familiarization with the throttle, E-gear and brakes quickly improved the situation. But it's not a car you want to drive in and out of tight places in a hurry or haphazardly nor is it one you allow someone inexperienced with it to park it. Storage in the Gallardo is almost non-existent. There's no cubby storage to speak of. We discovered, however, that the trunk, in the very front of the car, holds a small, carry-on trolley bag, the size designed to fit in an overhead storage bin. So picking someone up at the airport is only viable if he or she was traveling light for an overnight trip.

Driving Impressions
To drive the Lamborghini Gallardo Superleggera is to drive one of the most exciting, powerful and capable sports cars in the world today. Lamborghini quotes a 0-62 mph time of 3.8 seconds, and a top speed just under 200 miles per hour. The six-speed manual transmission is a very good transmission hobbled by a Sixties-style shifting gate built into the floor console, an anachronism that makes it difficult to shift cleanly and smoothly. Although we spent some time with the clunky-shifting 6-speed manual version, we spent most of our test drive time on the roads around Scottsdale, Arizona, and at Phoenix International Raceway with the much more attractive E-gear version. The E-gear transmission is a combination of manual and automatic that is shifted up and down by paddles on the steering column (not to the steering wheel itself, so they don't move with the wheel). With the paddles and buttons used to control the transmission scattered about the cabin, it might not at first appear intuitive, but we quickly adjusted to it and found it easier to work than the electronic shifter on the BMW 7 Series sedans. To get Neutral, you pull back on both paddles at once. To drive in automatic mode, push the console-mounted button with a large A on it. To engage Reverse, touch the R button on the dashboard. Although the E-gear transmission can be clunky, too, especially as it downshifts into first before coming to a stop, it is a joy to use in performance driving situations, shifting in lightning-fast fashion under full throttle and blipping the throttle on downshifts to match engine rpm to road speed. This transmission, coupled to a 522-hp engine that doesn't run out of revs until 8000 rpm, makes for an exciting driving experience. We found the different modes useful, depending on whether we were cruising around town talking (Auto), cruising (Normal, shifting manually), or driving fast (Sport, shifting manually). The big blips when downshifting are addictive, and we found ourselves downshifting just to hear it. You need do nothing with your feet. The thoroughly sorted-out racing-style suspension system on the five-year-old Gallardo works in concert with a front/rear weight distribution of 42/58 percent, the huge, sticky Pirelli P Zero Corse tires, the car's low center of gravity, and its viscous-coupling all-wheel-drive system to deliver acceleration, cornering and braking that few other cars on this planet can match. The viscous coupling can send up to 100 percent of the engine's torque to either the front or rear tires, but normally operates at 42 percent front-drive and 58 percent rear-drive for maximum performance on dry pavement. At the same time, the steering is ultra-direct and quick, and the ride is reasonably plush and quiet, though it does crash pretty hard on rough pavement and potholes. In daily driving, it's actually quite pleasant, though we wouldn't drive a Gallardo with a cappuccino in one hand. The stationary wing optional for the Superleggera is said to add more than 370 pounds of aerodynamic downforce to the rear of the car at high speeds. At night, however, it sometimes looked like cars behind were flashing their headlights at us as the wing obscured and revealed the headlight beams. Braking performance, even without the $10,000 optional carbon ceramic brakes, is exceptional, with a 60-0 braking distance of only about 109 feet, and a powerful feel that will pull you right up against your seatbelts in a panic stop situation. The carbon brakes seem grabby and hard to modulate smoothly at low speeds, especially when cold, but when driven hard they were smooth, easy to modulate, and quite effective. The pedal softened a bit as they got hot on a winding hillclimb. The Gallardo Superleggera quickly instills a huge degree of confidence in a good, experienced driver. At the same time, the Gallardo Superleggera was comfortable in heavy traffic and when motoring around town at low speeds. It was very tractable and never balked at going slow in first gear.

Summary
We think the Lamborghini Gallardo was a very special sports car as it was, easy to drive, dramatic to look at, an all-around sexy beast. But with the advent of the Superleggera version, the Gallardo becomes even more exciting and more special. Only about 350 of these cars will be available worldwide, making them instant collector's items.

The 2008 Lamborghini Gallardo does not appear to have been designed by Industrial Light & Magic for "Star Wars." It isn't wider than a Chevy Silverado. The doors don't slice and dice and make julienne fries. These are some of the attributes common to Lamborghinis of the past 30 years -- a wild mix of sports cars that took the word "exotic" to an entirely new level. But cars like the Countach, Diablo and most recently, Murcielago, were not only wildly expensive, but they could also be cumbersome to drive. The Gallardo is only really expensive (versus wildly), and with saner dimensions, traditional doors and a more habitable cockpit, it is the first Lamborghini in decades to be considered actually livable. And what a life it must be. Joining the Gallardo coupe this year is the Spyder convertible, which adds that wonderful sun-on-your-shoulders feeling to the already well-established levels of high-speed fun. Cutting the roof off a car tends to impinge upon such fun, but 250 pounds of structural reinforcement not only doesn't impinge, it blesses this baby Lambo with unyielding integrity. Its confidence and composure over all but the most severe pavement ripples will quickly have you flinging the nubile exotic through twists, turns and dips like Fred and Ginger -- or Joey Fatone and that blonde girl from "Dancing with the Stars," if you have no idea who Fred and Ginger are.Though hyperbole is always dangerous, it's hard to describe the 2008 Gallardo as anything but Lamborghini's best car ever. Perhaps not the most memorable nor the most likely to be a timeless classic, but in terms of actual driving acumen, it can't be topped. Sure, the baby bull may not have the outrageousness of the Murcielago, but in all other respects it's a better overall package.The Gallardo's primary competition, however, comes not from the Murcielago but from the Aston Martin V8 Vantage, the Ferrari F430 and the Porsche 911 Turbo. The related Audi R8 is also incredibly impressive, while being vastly cheaper. The Ferrari and Porsche in particular are more adept road machines than the Lambo, and all would make worthy additions to any (amazing) garage. But so much of the exotic car class is about style and flash. The 2008 Lamborghini Gallardo certainly has plenty of both, even if it doesn't boast absurdly large wings and scissor doors.

Body Styles, Trim Levels, and Options
The 2008 Lamborghini Gallardo is a two-seat high-performance exotic sports car available in coupe and convertible (Spyder) body styles. Standard equipment includes 19-inch wheels, automatic extending rear spoiler, bi-xenon headlights, dual-zone automatic climate control, leather upholstery, a four-speaker stereo with six-CD changer and two auxiliary audio jacks, and the multimedia control interface virtually identical to Audi's MMI system. The Spyder convertible adds a fully powered soft top and integrated tonneau cover. Options include a suspension lift system to prevent front spoiler scrapes, a rearview camera, garage door opener, heated mirrors, navigation system, trip computer and an in-car television that displays on the in-dash multimedia LCD screen. Lamborghini also offers a variety of special-order "Privilegio" options, most of which involve specialty colors and trims.

Powertrains and Performance
The Gallardo is powered by a 5.0-liter V10 producing 512 horsepower and 376 pound-feet of torque. All Gallardos sport all-wheel drive. A six-speed manual transmission with gated metal shifter is standard, while a six-speed automanual transmission known as e-gear is optional. The sprint from zero to 60 mph should take around 4 seconds.

Safety
The Gallardo comes standard with antilock brakes, stability control and side airbags. A rearview camera is optional, while a spoiler deploys at 75 mph for added downforce.

Interior Design and Special Features
The Audi influence is obvious inside the Gallardo, with plenty of properly fitting leather and soft-touch materials. The cockpit features comfortable seating that won't leave you reaching for the painkillers, while the driving position is a big improvement over past Lambos. The Lamborghini version of Audi's MMI electronics interface is a bit counterintuitive, as the control knob and accompanying buttons are placed next to the screen rather than near the shifter. Essentially, it takes the driver's eyes off the road for too long -- and in a car that can go 195 mph, that's never a good thing.Though not as flamboyant as the exterior, the interior styling is still suitable for a vehicle that commands such a high price of admission. Like everything Audi touches, build and materials quality is excellent. Storage space is minimal; just a bit of room is available behind the seats of the coupe and in the nose-mounted trunk.

Driving Impressions
At full throttle, the V10 produces a sweet soundtrack truly befitting a Lamborghini. With 512 hp on tap, the 2008 Lamborghini Gallardo is capable of warp speed from any gear. It's true that the big V10 and all-wheel-drive system do make the Gallardo a bit portly for this class of car, and it has been hyperbolically described as feeling like "a faster, more expensive Audi TT." Therefore, it doesn't quite provide the same razor's-edge responsiveness that one can get from, say, a Ferrari F430. Additionally, the brakes, though immensely powerful, can be inconsistent in feel when pushed to their limit. There's still plenty to like about the Gallardo, though, particularly the Spyder, which provides the thrilling combination of Lamborghini thrills and top-down sunshine. Balanced all-wheel-drive handling and a great Audi-inspired interior make the 2008 Lamborghini Gallardo a surprisingly livable exotic.

Pros
Prodigious V10 power, ferocious traction of all-wheel drive, seductive engine and exhaust noise, Spyder's top-down fun, standout styling.