Unveiled at the 1981 Geneva Motor Show and in production from 1982, the Jalpa P350 replaced the Silhouette as Lamborghini's junior mid-engined car. It carried over the Silhouette's basic architecture — transverse mid-mounted V8, dogleg 5-speed transaxle, targa roof — but enlarged the engine to 3,485 cc (L353), reskinned the body under new Bertone style director Marc Deschamps (Gandini had left in 1980; the Jalpa is not a Gandini car, though it inherits Silhouette proportions), and — critically — was federalised for the US market. It remained in production until Chrysler, having acquired Lamborghini in 1987, cancelled it in 1988 to concentrate on the Countach and the forthcoming Diablo.
Total production: Verify. Four separate figures circulate in the published record, and no single source reconciles them:
• 410 — the most widely repeated figure and the one used by nearly every specialist and auction-house catalogue in the review period: Wikipedia; LamboCars model guide; LamboCars per-model production table; Bonhams Gstaad 2022 Lot 117 ('by which time 410 cars had been built'); RM Sotheby's Auburn Fall 2021 Lot 4144 ('One of 410 Jalpas produced'); Exclusive Car Registry; and the French text of Bonhams Paris 2024 Lot 161 ('un total de 410 environ').
• 414 — International Lamborghini Registry (a dedicated marque-specific registry), which states 'Total Produced: 414' and lists 417 cars in its own database.
• 416 — Conceptcarz's dedicated Jalpa model page ('Only 416 Jalpas were sold'), independently corroborated by the English text of Bonhams Paris 2024 Lot 161 ('416 cars') — the two figures in that single Bonhams lot (410 French / 416 English) are attributed to historian Olivier Nameche.
• 420 — Lamborghini's own 40th-anniversary press release (lamborghini.com, 2021: 'it was pulled from the line with 420 units sold') and Supercars.net.
On source-quality weighting, no figure is unambiguously definitive. The factory's own 420 has the strongest institutional authority but is a marketing-press figure without chassis-list backing. The International Lamborghini Registry's 414 has the strongest methodological authority (marque-specific registry keeping VIN records) but publishes a total that doesn't match its own database count (417). 410 has the weight of repetition across the specialist and auction ecosystem but appears to be a widely-recirculated single lineage rather than four independent determinations. 416 is the least widely repeated but is independently attested by two separate sources of different types. The 10-unit spread most plausibly reflects factory prototypes, development mules, pre-production cars and the two Bertone Spyder prototypes being counted differently across sources, but this is not documented in any source retrieved.
RHD production is separately cited as 'one of 35 right-hand drive cars' by Bonhams (auction 22718, Lot 12) — the only published RHD figure retrieved and worth treating as indicative pending a factory registry cross-check.
The Jalpa is a single continuous production run with a running mid-life update at the 1984 Geneva Motor Show (round tail-lights replacing the earlier rectangular units; body-colour plastic trim in place of black). No source retrieved treats pre-1984 and post-1984 cars as separately-numbered sub-series, and no year-by-year production breakdown is published in any fetched source.
The Jalpa is the last Lamborghini in the Urraco → Silhouette → Jalpa 'junior V8' lineage that began in 1970 and the only car in that lineage sold new in the United States on federal certification. It is also the last car developed under the Mimran-era ownership before Chrysler, and the only Lamborghini production model of the 1980s not to use the V12. As small-Lamborghini prices have run away in the Countach shadow, the Jalpa has moved from cheap-Lambo territory to a credible collector market of its own — the top public sale of the review period was $174,500 (BaT, November 2024) for a 3,900 km 1988 car.
