Lamborghini Countach

This is the catalogue record of the Lamborghini Countach, one of 96 models Lamborghini has placed in the historical record and one of more than seventeen thousand cars the MotorJury library tracks. The record places its introduction in 1974. The photography on this page is hotlinked from Wikimedia Commons under an open licence, with the photographer credited on every frame.

The era it was born into

To read the Lamborghini Countach properly it helps to place it in its decade. The 1970s were the decade the oil crises rewired the industry — emissions rules, safety bumpers and fuel economy suddenly mattered as much as horsepower, and Japanese manufacturers went global. Any car launched into that world was shaped by it — by what materials, engineering and regulation allowed, and by what buyers of the day demanded. Its direct contemporaries in this catalogue, introduced within three years of it, include the Volkswagen Volkswagen Golf, the Volkswagen Volkswagen Scirocco, the Jeep Jeep Cherokee — the cars a buyer of the period would actually have cross-shopped.

The numbers, read closely

On paper, the Lamborghini Countach reads like this: the record lists its engine as Lamborghini V12 / LP400, LP400 S: 3929 cc / LP500 S: 4754 cc / 5000 QV, 25th Anniversary: 5167 cc; kerb weight is recorded at 1300.5 kg (LP400) / 1351 kg (LP400S) / 1488 kg (LP5000QV); top speed is given as 290 km/h; drive goes through 5-speed synchromesh manual; the layout is Longitudinal mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive. Every figure above is a manufacturer specification carried by the Wikipedia infobox or the open Wikidata record for this model — nothing on this page is estimated, and where a source is silent the row simply does not appear. Production is recorded at 1,999 units, which makes it a limited-production machine by any standard.

Its place in the Lamborghini story

Within Lamborghini's own catalogue the Lamborghini Countach sits alongside the Lamborghini Calà (1995), the Lamborghini Marco Polo, the Lambo 291, the Lamborghini 350 GT. The record names the Lamborghini Miura as its predecessor and the Lamborghini Diablo (direct) / Lamborghini Countach LPI 800-4 (nameplate) as its successor, fixing its place in the model line's chronology. Design is credited to Marcello Gandini at Bertone. Assembly is recorded at Italy: Sant'Agata Bolognese.

How this catalogue works

This library is generated, verified and rebuilt from the open record on every deploy. The catalogue skeleton comes from Wikidata, specifications from Wikipedia's infoboxes under CC BY-SA, photography from Wikimedia Commons under each file's own licence, and the ownership data from United States federal safety records. Nothing is written by hand and nothing is invented: every fact on this page traces to a public source, and every page is rebuilt nightly as those sources improve. Errors in the source record will appear here too — and disappear the night the source is corrected.

Why concepts and prototypes are in the library

Most car databases stop at series production. This one deliberately does not, because concept cars, racing specials and cancelled prototypes are where the industry thinks out loud — the ideas tested in public years before they reach a showroom. Holding them beside the production cars they inspired makes the lineage legible: nearly every landmark road car in this library has a concept ancestor somewhere in the catalogue, and the connections run through the era links on every page.

From catalogue to ownership

The catalogue records what the Lamborghini Countach was; the ownership database records what it is like to own. MotorJury computes a verdict for every model year the United States federal record covers — complaints, recalls, real economy — refreshed nightly, with no opinions involved. If this car reached the American market, its verdicts are in there.