Lamborghini Gallardo has been with us for over a decade now but we are not tired of it yet. They just announced a new version of it at Los Angeles Motor Show.

It’s the long rumored Lamborghini Gallardo LP550-2 Spyder, a rear-drive sort of Balboni version of the Spyder. Lamborghini people say it’s the swan song for the Gallardo, but even they don’t believe that. Who cares anyway. It’s brilliant.

The car is powered by a detuned version of Gallardo’s V10 with 550 hp and an e-gear transmission. Don’t worry, you can’t have it with a proper manual as well.

With the conversion from 4 to 2-wheel-drive the Gallardo loses some of its grip, but then make up for it with a new ESP program that controls the car’s behavior in normal mode, and let it become a lairy beast in CORSA mode. The LP550-2 will be more fun to drive than normal models as a result.

Because of the rear-drive setup the car is also lighter than the standard Gallardo, so despite the lower power it’s still pretty fast with a 0 to 100 km/h time of 4.2 seconds and top speed of 319 km/h.

Visually the car is the same as the normal Spyder and don’t get any special treatment. We think it could do with a nice stripe, but then people would mistake it for the Performante!