A short clip posted to Instagram by the account monaco_luxurystyle shows a Lamborghini Sián FKP 37 crawling through the Principality near Cipriani Monte Carlo, with the poster attributing the car to Fernando Alonso. Fair warning before anyone gets excited: the occupants aren’t visible in the footage. What you get is the car, the crowd, and a V12 bouncing off the underpass walls. The identification comes from the person holding the phone, not from anything you can independently see in the frame.
That caveat matters less than it normally would, because the pool of candidates is small. There are 63 Sián coupes on the planet. Alonso, who is in his fourth season with Aston Martin’s F1 team, has been repeatedly filmed in Monaco with hardware from his own collection. Take it as strongly suggestive rather than confirmed.
The genuinely interesting part isn’t who’s driving. It’s that anyone is.
Sián FKP 37s do not get used. Two recent auction catalogues make that painfully clear. RM Sotheby’s sold a Swiss-delivered 2021 example last October showing just 410 kilometres on the odometer, and the same house has a US car heading to Monterey this month with 308 miles showing at cataloguing, after a stint in the Petersen Automotive Museum’s Hypercars: The Allure of the Extreme exhibition. These things live in climate-controlled rooms and get moved by flatbed. rmsothebys
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So a Sián sitting in Monaco traffic, warm, in daylight, with an audience — that’s the story. Whoever owns this one treats it as a car.
What’s actually under the engine cover
Lamborghini’s launch release puts the naturally aspirated 6.5-litre V12 at 785 CV at 8,500 rpm, with a 48V motor delivering 34 CV integrated into the gearbox, for 819 CV combined and a claimed 0-100 km/h in under 2.8 seconds. That’s roughly 774 hp from the engine and 808 hp all in, depending on which conversion you prefer. lamborghini
The clever bit is the storage medium. Instead of a lithium-ion pack, the Sián uses a supercapacitor mounted in the bulkhead between the cabin and the engine. If you’ve never had to think about the distinction: batteries win on energy density — how much total charge they hold — while supercapacitors win on power density, meaning how violently fast they can dump or absorb that charge. For a mild-hybrid whose entire job is filling torque holes during ISR gearchanges and adding shove off the line, power density is the metric that matters and energy density is nearly irrelevant. You’re not driving this thing on electrons. You’re using them for milliseconds at a time.
Which is why Lamborghini’s own marketing copy is worth a squint. The Sián release describes the system as three times more powerful than an equivalent lithium-ion battery — correct framing. But the company’s current Countach LPI 800-4 page, describing the same hardware, claims the supercapacitor stores ten times more energy than a lithium-ion battery. That’s backwards. Supercapacitors store dramatically less energy per kilogram than lithium-ion cells. Somebody in the copy chain swapped “power” for “energy,” and the error has been sitting on the model page for years. lamborghini
The ownership reality nobody puts in the brochure
Here’s the detail that should interest anyone shopping one of these. Attached to that Swiss Sián’s listing was an addendum noting the car was due to return to Lamborghini Zürich for repairs to the 48v battery, scheduled post-sale at the vendor’s expense. Four hundred and ten kilometres. Essentially a delivery-mileage car, and the electrified half of the powertrain needed attention. rmsothebys
That listing also shows a March 2025 service invoiced at CHF 4,226.50 — which, for context, is more than a decent used hatchback, on a car that had barely moved. And note the language: the auction house calls it a battery, because that’s what the diagnostic system and the dealer paperwork treat it as. rmsothebys
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The practical lesson is about orphan technology. Only three Lamborghinis ever used this architecture — 63 Sián coupes, 19 Sián Roadsters, and 112 Countach LPI 800-4s. Under 200 cars worldwide sharing a supercapacitor module, a 48V motor-generator, and the specific control software that ties them together. That is not a parts bin. It’s a rounding error. If you’re buying one, the service history on the electrical system is worth more scrutiny than the paint, and “dealer-maintained by a Lamborghini main dealer” is not a nice-to-have — it’s the whole game. Independent specialists who can properly diagnose a 48V supercapacitor fault on a car with a three-digit production run are not thick on the ground.
Where the market sits
The Zurich car made CHF 2,086,250 against a CHF1.7m–2m estimate. The Monterey car carries a $2.2–2.6 million estimate and wore nearly $237,000 in Ad Personam options and carbon packages when new. Solid money, but these are not appreciating like a Miura, and the six-figure optioning doesn’t come back to you. Magnetomagazine rmsothebys
Part of that is because Lamborghini itself walked away from the concept. The Revuelto uses a conventional lithium-ion pack, three motors and a dual-clutch gearbox for 1,015 CV — more power, plug-in capability, and a supply chain shared with the rest of the Volkswagen Group. The Sián’s supercapacitor was a proof of concept, not a foundation.
The brand around it is holding up. Lamborghini’s half-year results posted €1.74 billion in revenue, up 7.4%, on 5,422 cars delivered — down 4.6% year on year — with an order book running roughly a year. Fewer cars, more money each. Which is exactly the environment that produces things like the Sián in the first place. lamborghini
So: someone in Monaco is putting mileage on one of the rarest V12s Sant’Agata ever built, in a place where the cars usually exist to be photographed. Whether or not it’s Alonso, that’s the right way to own one.
Images Via: Monaco_luxurystyle on Instagram
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