Why Lamborghini’s CFO Thinks Europe Rushed the EV Shift

Lamborghinis are built to go fast, but the company’s CFO thinks Europe could have eased off the gas a bit in its push for electric cars. 

By the luxury supercar maker’s CFO Paolo Poma’s reckoning, it takes about five years to develop a car and nine to 10 years to depreciate the investment. Europe tried to change what powered its cars in about a decade, giving automakers too little time, in his view, to make the figures work. 

“We let the regulation drive the change of the market,” Poma told CFO Upside in a recent interview. An engineer by training, Poma became CFO of Ducati in 2011 and joined Lamborghini in 2017 from Volkswagen Group Italia, the Italian arm of Lamborghini’s parent group, where he was CFO and managing director.

Poma still sees electrification as the industry’s long-term direction, but his main objection is pace of change. Automakers had to commit money to new powertrains before demand had caught up, while they were still carrying investments in the cars they already sold.

“[European automakers and regulators] made a big mistake back in 2015,” Poma said.

Poma traces that rush to Europe’s response to that year’s diesel emissions scandal. He explained how European automakers turned to suppliers in Asia for components they couldn’t source closer to home. Those parts cost more than expected and squeezed margins, he said. To compensate, automakers raised prices on combustion-engine cars, putting more pressure on demand for those models, too.

“Then all the OEMs kept on increasing prices on combustion and existing cars, thus creating stress on the demand,” Poma said.

That’s where the financial consequences extended beyond EV sales in companies in the luxury and broader auto market. Poma said that some of the cost of the transition landed with buyers who were still shopping for a gas-powered car. Automakers were counting on that business while they invested in what would come next, and higher prices made those cars harder to sell.

Priced for Power

Lamborghini decided fairly early to go with hybrids, with Poma’s pitch at the time being straightforward. The electric hardware could make the car more powerful, something Lamborghini buyers already had a reason to pay for. The same investment helped the automaker meet the EU’s new emissions rules.

That gave Lamborghini a way to put electrification into cars it could sell while it built expertise in designing and building fully electric vehicles. Poma expects those to come eventually, though he gave no timetable. The company can keep developing the technology without having to settle today on when customers will be ready to buy it.

Lamborghini calls its hybrids HPEVs, short for high-performance electrified vehicles. The name, Poma said, puts the emphasis on what the electric hardware adds to the car’s performance.

“Maybe it’s just a marketing [tool], but it’s clearly showing our concept,” he said.

Lamborghini takes a similarly measured approach to how many cars it plans to sell. In 2027, it’s aiming for an increase measured in, in Poma’s terms, “tens of cars.” Keeping deliveries in check, he made clear, helps preserve exclusivity and supports resale values.

“We don’t want to sell more cars than what is demanded,” he said. And, that strategy leaves room to grow revenue by earning more on each car. “Personalization is a big part of our revenue stream,” Poma said, putting its contribution at nearly 20%. 

When asked how Lamborghini can keep its cars exclusive while courting Gen Z buyers who might be much less willing to wait, Poma pointed to the younger customers it already has.

“Young rich people have always been a part of our customer base,” Poma said. He said that hasn’t changed since he joined the company. He said that more than 40% of Lamborghini’s customers are under 40, and the company uses events and social media to reach younger buyers.

“We are always trying to nurture our positioning as a cool brand,” he said.

How far to take personalization becomes a different financial question when it means developing another version of a car. Asked about the enthusiasm for modifiers’ custom creations like the trending manual Gallardo, Poma said some customers still indeed ask for things like a manual transmission.

But, Lamborghini has no such feature in its current plans, though he said the brand is floating the idea of limited editions based on past models as one way to serve those buyers. Other automakers like Ford and Porsche have tapped into enthusiast demand with limited releases, from a special-edition SUV to an espresso machine inspired by a rare model. 

Struts and Shocks 

Asked to pick the external risk that worries him most, Poma quickly pointed to tariffs. The US is Lamborghini’s biggest market by far, he said, and unpredictable tariffs make it harder to grow there. He sees the impact playing out over the short to medium term and remains confident in the spending power of American buyers.

Lamborghini has prepared for swings it can’t control by lowering its break-even point, Poma said. He described that as one of the company’s “antidotes” to uncertainty. A lower break-even point gives Lamborghini more room to absorb weaker sales before it starts losing money. Poma didn’t specify how much the threshold had fallen or what changes got the company there.

“We adapted our way of doing to this growing uncertainty,” he said.

Much like many of his CFO peers, Poma takes a similar approach to deciding where to spend on AI. Lamborghini uses Microsoft Copilot for office work, but Poma sees more value in tools built for specific jobs. The company has developed roughly 50 to 60 AI business cases over two to three years and has worked with partners on specialized applications. The next step is to give those tools access to a common pool of company data so teams can build on the work they’ve already done.

Poma said he expects AI to find its way into Lamborghini’s processes down the road, and he started with individual use cases to see where the economics made sense. Now that the company has worked through dozens of them, he’s looking at what it would take to build the shared platform.

“From day one, I said [AI] will be pervasive in the future, in the business, in our processes,” he said.

As Poma approaches a decade as CFO, he’s spending more time coaching his team on how to make decisions. He joked that AI would be his successor, then explained what had kept him in the job. Revenue was below €1 billion when he arrived and has grown to more than €3 billion, by his account. He also shared with enthusiasm that profit went from around break-even to close to €800 million.

More Than Routine Maintenance: Poma credits that growth in part to watching how much the company makes on its cars and controlling how fast it expands. The industry’s changes have made the job more stressful, he said, and they’re also part of what keeps it interesting. Now, he says his top priority as a manager is helping his team develop. “[Any finance team] delivers more if you coach them,” he said.