Did you hear the one about the hot Italian and the engineering students? Well, the Volkswagen Group wants you to know its Lamborghini brand just formed a relationship with the MIT-Italy Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, according to a VW Group news release.
Is is not a weekend seminar or a semester study, but a partnership for the next 1,000 years, according to Lamborghini’s Chairman and CEO, Stefano Domenicali. “We want people to think of us more and more as a trendsetter in the super luxury and sports car segment,” Domenicali said in the statement. “MIT has always been a pioneer in innovation and we are proud to have signed this general agreement with such an illustrious institution, which will lead to the study of issues of mutual interest relating to the super sports car for the third millennium.”
The primary focus of the joint research will be in new automotive materials. Lamborghini engineers and MIT students and teaching staff will collaborate on projects and workshops. The goal is to identify “mutually interesting, cutting-edge research projects” leading to super sports cars for the future.
MIT-Italy Program co-director Serenella Sferza said, “MIT-Italy is a two-way bridge linking MIT and outstanding names in Italian industry. It is hard for us to imagine a better partner than Lamborghini, and we are looking forward to the projects that this partnership will help us develop.”
The partnership is also about international trade. Michele Scannavini, the Chairman of ICE, the Italian trade agency said, “Last year, Italian technology in general came first in terms of overall trade with the USA, with a share of 30 percent … agreements like this with Lamborghini are proof of the undisputed excellence of our industries in the field of innovation.”
