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The automotive industry is no stranger to software. For decades, digital modules have made cars safer, more predictable, and—especially with recent advances in traction and stability control—faster. Simultaneously, digital tools have had much the same effect on the design process, helping engineers eke out even more performance without asking for any additional driving talent in exchange. But plain old software is very Y2K. This is 2025, where everything’s computers. The next logical step, of course, is AI.
Whether it’s being grafted onto your car’s “smart” assistant or buried deep in the design process, AI has touched virtually every new car in some way or another. And now, Lamborghini wants to use it to touch you. But don’t take my word for it; The Drive Editor-in-Chief Kyle Cheromcha sat down with Lamborghini CTO Rouven Mohr during Monterey Car Week, and learned how drivers might better tame their raging bulls with a little binary assistance.
“We are already using AI—it’s not fully AI, it’s a kind of first step machine learning—for the torque management that is adopting torque distribution based on the surface and on the driving style of the driver,” Mohr said. “In the future, you can imagine that the car theoretically can even recognize your emotions and is adapting the controls based on the emotion.”
A car that adapts based on your feelings? It sounds far-fetched, but your car knows more about your state of mind than you might realize, and Mohr says it’s only a small leap from simple attention- and drowsiness-monitoring devices to a suite designed to track your mood.
“Because if the car would be smart enough to detect if you want to have fun, if the car is going a little bit more sideways, theoretically the algorithm could say, ‘okay, this guy wants to have a little bit more side angle,’” he said. “And it’s managing that rotation of the car in a different way.”
Things get even more interesting from there, because why stop with mood? Lamborghini has already conceived of systems that adapt their software intervention “rules” based on driver behavior. If you’re smooth with your inputs and laying down consistent, clean laps, the computer automatically relaxes some of the car’s nannies. Start messing up, and the safety net begins to close again.
Mohr said AI could even fill in the proverbial blanks in a driver’s performance.
“If the algorithm is recognizing every time, every corner, unfortunately the driver is using too much steering angle, it’ll create more understeer. If you have a steer-by-wire system, the algorithm is learning. Okay, now I don’t give the driver so much steering angle to avoid it.”
But all this smart tech requires more than just new software; you need the monitoring devices to feed it all that data. Lamborghini’s physical ace up its sleeve is its “6D Sensor,” which it teased with the unveiling of the Fenomeno. The module itself is no bigger than a baseball, but it does quite a bit of lifting.
Mohr calls the 6D Sensor its “enabler.” While the magic may be in the algorithm, he told us, that software can’t do anything without a constant stream of high-quality data.
“[The algorithm] understands the surroundings and the 6D sensor is giving the algorithm a much more precise information about the status of the car regarding the rolling, the pitching, because you have six degrees of freedom in the space and this sensor is measuring explicitly the motion of the body.” Mohr said.
In a conventional setup, those measurements would be taken by separate sensors, then fed to separate modules which would then have to “talk” to each other. Not only does this process take time, but the small chunks of data being transmitted represent brief snapshots from those independent sensors, which the various computers stitch together into an approximation of what the car is doing—or perhaps more accurately, what it was doing a few milliseconds ago.
“If you have the precise information of the body movement, you are much more precise in the management of the control of the car,” Mohr said. “So this is the door opener for the future, let me say for the future.”
Lamborghini isn’t alone in exploring advanced driver monitoring algorithms that would interface with onboard safety systems. BMW’s new electronic “superbrains” are smart enough that they can recognize driver intent. Imagine you’re on a narrow, two-lane road and need to cross the center line to pass a parked delivery vehicle. Most lane departure warning systems would trigger as the car approached the center lane marking, but BMW says it can use a combination of attention monitoring cameras and steering wheel torque sensors to interpret deliberate maneuvers and override the usual alarms.
If only all back-seat drivers could be so readily silenced.
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Byron is a contributing writer and auto reviewer with a keen eye for infrastructure, sales and regulatory stories.
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