Lamborghini Miura (1966–1973)

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The car that put the engine behind the driver and made the supercar a shape.

When Lamborghini showed the Miura in 1966, it rearranged how a fast car should be built. Its V12 sat behind the driver and ahead of the rear axle — the first time a high-performance production road car used that mid-engine layout, which every serious supercar has copied since. Marcello Gandini's body for Bertone was low, wide and impossibly clean, and it made the mechanical layout look inevitable.

The engineering was as bold as the styling: the 3.9-litre V12 was mounted transversely and shared its casting with the gearbox to save space. The Miura weighed around 1,180 kg and was, at launch, the fastest production car in the world. It stayed in production until 1973.

Only 764 were built. The Miura is where the modern supercar begins — not as a spec sheet, but as a silhouette everyone recognised at once.

Written and fact-checked for every.autos · every claim checked against the sources below · 2026-07

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Background

The Lamborghini Miura is a sports car produced by Italian automaker Lamborghini between 1966 and 1973. The car was the first high-performance production road car with a rear mid-engine, rear-wheel-drive layout, which has since become the standard for performance-oriented sports cars. When released, it was the fastest production car in the world.

Text adapted from “Lamborghini Miura” on Wikipedia ↗ · CC BY-SA 4.0 ↗ · retrieved 2026-07

Specification