This is the new Tamiya R/C Lamborghini Cheetah prototype, it’s the new 1/12th scale model of the iconic Italian military off-roader, the vehicle that was the godfather of both the Lamborghini LM002 “Rambo Lambo” and the modern-day Lamborghini Urus.
The Cheetah has today been largely forgotten outside of vintage automotive circles, but it deserves to be a whole lot better remembered than it is.
This is the new Lamborghini Cheetah prototype R/C kit from Tamiya, it’s a 1:12th scale model of the experimental military off-roader first shown at the 1977 Geneva Motor Show by the Italian supercar maker.
History Speedrun: The Lamborghini Cheetah Prototype
The Lamborghini Cheetah was a four-wheel-drive military prototype, with a Chrysler V8 in the back, designed and largely assembled in California, and shown on Lamborghini’s stand at the Geneva Motor Show in March of ’77. It was built to win a US Army contract for a new light utility vehicle, but the Army never bought it. This was probably for the best, as Lamborghini was bankrupt by the next year.
The Cheetah design actually came from Mobility Technology International (MTI) of San Jose, where a number of former FMC employees worked on the project. FMC was a California defense contractor behind the M113 armored personnel carrier. The Cheetah design drew heavily on the earlier XR311, a rear-engined off-roader the Army evaluated in the early 1970s.
MTI’s president, Rodney Pharis, designed the Cheetah, Lamborghini (then owned by Swiss investors Georges-Henri Rossetti and René Leimer) was short of money after the 1973 Oil Crisis and taking outside work, it had also agreed to develop and build BMW’s M1. Under the Cheetah plan, MTI would build Army vehicles in the US, while Sant’Agata hoped to build civilian examples for buyers in Europe and the Middle East.
In retrospect it was a Hail Mary plan with limited chances of success, but the Lamborghini board new how much trouble the company was in financially, and they also doubtless knew how lucrative a US military contract would be. In planning to build a luxury civilian version, Lamborghini had shown some remarkable prescience, as in the decades to come the high-end SUV would become a major money spinner for many automakers.
Lamborghini Cheetah: Specifications
MTI shipped the Cheetah prototype to Italy almost complete, finished in satin desert sand paintwork, and Lamborghini put its badge on the nose. Job done. It had a tubular steel chassis and an open body, with doors and a roof listed as optional extras. Jeep guys would have loved it.
A 360 cubic inch (5.9 liter) Chrysler V8, rated by Lamborghini at 180 bhp with 267 lb ft of torque, drove all four wheels full-time through a 3-speed Chrysler A727 automatic box. Each tire held a high-pressure inner tube inside a low-pressure outer, so the vehicle could keep moving if the outer lost air pressure. Interestingly, the ventilated front disc brakes were shared with the Countach.
The Lamborghini Cheetah was a four-wheel-drive military prototype, with a Chrysler V8 in the back, designed and largely assembled in California, and shown on Lamborghini’s stand at the Geneva Motor Show in March of 1977. Images provided by Lamborghini.
Lamborghini gave a dry weight of 4,500 lbs, a top speed just over 100 mph and 0 to 62 mph in 9.0 seconds. Not terrible numbers given the weight and engine combination.
Testers noticed that, with the engine mounted so far back, the Cheetah handled erratically, and its resemblance to the earlier XR311 prototype drew legal threats from FMC after the Geneva debut.
The End Of The Program
Lamborghini says the project never progressed beyond one prototype and the story that it was crashed during testing in the US has been repeated for decades, but the more detailed histories say it survived and passed to Teledyne Continental Motors when MTI sold that company the design rights.
Its present whereabouts are unclear, and no one seems to be sure if it still exists at all. Teledyne is said to have reworked the vehicle for the Army’s HMMWV program, but their rivals over at AM General won the contract with their Humvee design.
Back in Sant’Agata, an Italian government loan meant to help put the BMW M1 into production ran out while the Cheetah program was under way. BMW took the M1 away from Lamborghini in April of 1978, and the Italian automaker was declared bankrupt later that year. The M1 was then built by Marchesi (chassis), Italdesign (body and interior), and Baur (final assembly).
The Descendants Of The Cheetah
After brothers Patrick and Jean-Claude Mimran took over Lamborghini, engineer Giulio Alfieri revived the idea as the LM001 super off-roader, shown at Geneva in 1981. It kept the engine at the back, and desert testing found the front axle went light on steep climbs and under hard acceleration. The Lamborghini LMA of 1982 moved a Countach V12 to the front for better weight distribution.
MTI shipped the Cheetah prototype to Italy almost complete, finished in satin desert sand paintwork, and Lamborghini put its badge on the nose. Job done. It had a tubular steel chassis and an open body, with doors and a roof listed as optional extras. Images provided by Lamborghini.
That front-engined layout reached production as the Lamborghini LM002, unveiled at the Brussels Motor Show in early 1986 with the 5.2 liter Countach Quattrovalvole V12, rated at 444 bhp. Lamborghini built 301 of them before production ended in 1992, Sylvester Stallone owned one, which might be why it was affectionately nicknamed the “Rambo Lambo.”
The link between the Cheetah, LM002, and the Urus is indirect – at the Urus concept’s debut at the 2012 Beijing Motor Show, Lamborghini boss Stephan Winkelmann said the company needed a third model line for sales stability. The production Urus, unveiled at Sant’Agata in late 2017, is based on the Volkswagen Group’s MLB Evo platform, shared with the Audi Q7, Porsche Cayenne, and Bentley Bentayga, and it uses a reworked Audi 4.0 liter twin-turbocharged V8 turning out 641 bhp.
Lamborghini describes the LM002 as the foundation that led to the Urus, and says the Urus’s hexagonal wheel arches refer to the LM002 and the Countach. That said, the company’s own history of its SUVs starts in Geneva in 1977, with the Cheetah.
The Tamiya Lamborghini Cheetah R/C Car
This is the new Lamborghini Cheetah prototype R/C kit from Tamiya, it’s a 1:12th scale model of the experimental military off-roader first shown at the 1977 Geneva Motor Show by the Italian supercar maker. Developed with Mobility Technology International for the U.S. military, the full-size Cheetah used a rear-mounted, waterproofed 5.9 liter Chrysler V8 producing 180 bhp, paired with a 3-speed automatic transmission.
The project wasn’t selected for military use, losing out to the Hummvee, and as a result it never reached production – but it became an important step toward Lamborghini’s later LM002.
The Tamiya version measures in at 400 mm long, 174 mm wide, and 140 mm high, with a body molded in Desert Yellow. Its iconic angular, doorless shape is reproduced with additional interior elements like seats, an instrument panel, fire extinguisher, rear mesh panel, and a driver figure. The kit includes a 540 brushed motor and electronic speed controller, while the radio system, steering servo, battery, charger, and paints are bought separately.
The Tamiya version of the Cheetah measures in at 400 mm long, 174 mm wide, and 140 mm high, with a body molded in Desert Yellow. Its iconic angular, doorless shape is reproduced with additional interior elements like seats, an instrument panel, fire extinguisher, rear mesh panel, and a driver figure.
The chassis is based on the earlier 1:12th scale Tamiya XR311 Combat Support Vehicle frame, though with a 10 mm shorter wheelbase. It uses a lightweight duralumin U-section frame, rear-mounted motor, central battery placement, sealed gearbox, and four-wheel independent double-wishbone suspension with adjustable longitudinal torsion bars.
Tamiya’s Lamborghini Cheetah is due to become available soon on their official website here, it’s a brand new design and as such those who want to get their hands on it soon will need to add their email address to the “Request Availability Notification” section on the store listing here.
Images provided by Tamiya USA + Lamborghini
Articles that Ben Branch has written have been covered on CNN, Popular Mechanics, Smithsonian Magazine, Road & Track Magazine, the official Pinterest blog, the official eBay Motors blog, BuzzFeed, Autoweek Magazine, Wired Magazine, Autoblog, Gear Patrol, Jalopnik, The Verge, and many more.
Silodrome was founded by Ben back in 2010, in the years since the site has grown to become a world leader in the alternative and vintage motoring sector, with well over a million monthly readers from around the world and many hundreds of thousands of followers on social media.
