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I wasn't necessarily suggesting that a supercar interior needs to be ornate, like a Zonda or similar, but when it comes to something like a Diablo it looks like no effort was expended on anything, be it ergonomics or design flair. Same applies to something like a Gumpert Apollo, though arguably the interior is the lesser of two aesthetic evils with that car.
And while small-volume supercar manufacturers don't have the benefit of economies of scale, they do have the benefit of customers who expect fairly long lead times before getting their vehicles. I can't imagine it'd cost someone making fifty cars too much extra to hire someone with a knack for leatherwork, for instance.
I mean hell, even TVR was able to put together (figuratively speaking) a decent interior (in terms of design and materials), and it was hardly an automotive giant. The very least I'd expect from a company making a ridiculous supercar is something on-par with a slightly shonky British roadster.
I can't comment on materials quality, but in design terms that doesn't appear too bad to me. Gets points for clarity, use of colour, and a steering wheel that's distinctly non-awful by the standards of the day. The dials look a bit naff admittedly, so it's a pity the 80s trend for digital instruments didn't continue into 1990.Put another way, there was a time that the worlds largest automaker spent a large portion of 7 billion 1980s dollars to debut a car that looked like this in 1990:
The contemporary Diablo, with its fat checks from Chrysler leading to a likely-unprecedented-for-Lamborghini supposed development budget of 6 billion... Lira... doesn't look too bad in comparison.
However, it does come back to my previous comment, that mass-produced cars might have the weight of a big OEM behind them and the design talent that carries with it, but they also have to be built down to a price. Particularly as the car itself gets smaller and has to be sold for less money. As I seem to recall James May putting it in a magazine feature once, a small car is basically the same as a large one in terms of cost, just built less bigly.
That's exactly the sort of crap there's no excuse for. It's fundamentally bad design, and not something that would have been any more expensive to do correctly had it been figured in at an early enough stage.Early (90-91) Diablos had a gauge cluster that was unusually tall and hard to see over in some cases. Plus the pedals are super close together, making the car hard to drive.
