The Only Factory Lamborghini Miura Roadster Ever Built

The 1968 Lamborghini Miura Roadster is the only factory-built open-top Miura in existence. One car. One prototype. Built by Marcello Gandini at Carrozzeria Bertone, debuted at the 1968 Brussels Motor Show, and widely regarded as the world’s first mid-engine convertible supercar. It never went into production. It was never supposed to. And that single fact is what makes it one of the most fascinating cars Lamborghini has ever put its name on.

I spend a lot of time looking at cars that were built to be rare. Limited runs of 50 or 100 units, each one laser-etched with a production number to remind the owner they’re part of an exclusive club. The Miura Roadster predates that entire playbook. It wasn’t limited. It was singular. Bertone built exactly one because Gandini wanted to see what the Miura looked like without a roof, and the engineering required to make that work was so extensive that doing it again at scale was never realistic.

What Gandini Actually Changed

This was not a coupe with the roof sawed off. That distinction matters.

Gandini lowered the roofline. He steepened the windscreen angle. He reshaped the entire rear bodywork, enlarged the air intakes, added a pronounced rear spoiler, and lowered the rollover hoop behind the cockpit. The box-section side members were strengthened to compensate for the structural rigidity lost by removing the fixed roof. Every one of those changes cascaded into the next, because when you open up a mid-engine car that was designed as a monocoque coupe, you are essentially re-engineering the relationship between the body and the chassis.

The result looked like the Miura coupe the way a tailored suit looks like the fabric it was cut from. Same material, completely different object.

One detail that separates the Roadster from the coupe in a way that photographs can never fully capture: the exposed V12. The coupe’s engine sits under a rear deck. The Roadster’s transverse mid-mounted V12 (P400 spec, producing between 350 and 370 horsepower) is visible from outside the car. You can stand behind it and look directly at the engine that Giotto Bizzarrini designed. It sits there like the centerpiece of a gallery exhibition, which, as of March 2026, it literally is.

Brussels, 1968

The Miura Roadster debuted at the Brussels Motor Show in January 1968, finished in light blue metallic over white leather with red carpets. The color combination sounds like an Italian flag reimagined by a man with extremely good taste and zero interest in subtlety. The car was a show piece in the purest sense. Lamborghini wanted to demonstrate what was possible at the edge of the Miura platform. The crowds at Brussels confirmed that what was possible was also irresistible.

But Lamborghini never put it into production. The structural limitations were real. Without the fixed roof contributing to the chassis rigidity, the Roadster couldn’t match the coupe’s torsional stiffness at speed. The windscreen geometry created aerodynamic complications. Ferruccio Lamborghini was building a car company that was barely five years old. He could afford to build one show car that pushed boundaries. He could not afford to build a production model that didn’t meet his own standards.

So the Miura Roadster remained a prototype. One of one.

The Zinc Detour

Here is where the story takes a turn that no fiction writer would dare invent.

In 1969, the car was sold to the International Lead and Zinc Research Organization in New York. They renamed it ZN 75, repainted it in an iridescent green, and recast various components in zinc and zinc alloy to study corrosion resistance in automotive applications. The world’s only mid-engine convertible supercar became a materials science experiment.

I think about this often. Somewhere in the late 1960s, a group of metallurgists in New York owned what is arguably the most beautiful open-top car of that decade and used it to test whether zinc could protect car parts from rust. They probably drove it to work. They definitely repainted it green.

The car survived. That alone deserves some kind of recognition.

The Restoration

In 2008, the Miura Roadster underwent a comprehensive restoration that returned it to its original 1968 Brussels Motor Show specification. The light blue metallic paint came back. The white leather interior came back. The red carpets came back. Everything the zinc researchers had altered was reversed with the kind of obsessive precision that only the Italian automotive restoration community can deliver.

The restored car debuted at the 2008 Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este, one of the most prestigious and selective concours events in the world, held on the shores of Lake Como. It received honors there, which confirmed what anyone who had seen the original photographs from Brussels already knew: this car, in its intended form, is one of the most beautiful automobiles of the twentieth century.

Where It Lives Now

The Miura Roadster currently sits in the Lamborghini Museum in Sant’Agata Bolognese, Italy, as part of the “Born Incomparable” exhibition running from March 2026 through January 2027. If you are planning a trip to Emilia-Romagna for any reason (and there are dozens of good reasons, starting with the food), the museum is worth a detour.

Lamborghini is also running a dedicated Miura tour from May 6 through May 10, 2026, which provides access to the car and the broader Miura heritage in a way that a standard museum visit cannot replicate.

Why This Car Matters

The Miura coupe changed the trajectory of the supercar. That story has been told so many times that it has become automotive gospel. Mid-engine layout. Transverse V12. Gandini’s design. The car that forced Ferrari to respond with the 365 GT4 BB and eventually the Berlinetta Boxer lineage. Everyone knows this.

The Roadster tells a different story. It tells you what happens when a 29-year-old designer (Gandini was born in 1938) is given permission to take something that already redefined a category and push it further. Not for production. Not for profit. For the pure exercise of seeing whether beauty could survive the removal of structure.

It could.

The car that resulted from that exercise was sold to metallurgists, painted green, used for corrosion testing, left in relative obscurity for decades, and then brought back to its original condition by people who understood what they were looking at. The Miura Roadster has lived more lives than most car companies.

One car. No production run. No numbered plaque on the dashboard. Just a V12 sitting in the open air, visible to anyone who walks behind it, doing exactly what Gandini intended it to do 58 years ago.