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Here. Pictures and everything for the curious.

Eerily quiet. Someone had one around my Michigan home town; the loud muffler crowd I hung out with was quite disappointed. Hear a "close-up" sample here.

Miller-cycle which requires a supercharger?

Supercharging raises volumetric efficiency in any case, and should be used on all vehicles. It permits the use of a smaller engine, which reduces vibration and rotating mass, and improves efficiency.

Surely not two-stroke with all pollution...

Ever heard of direct injection? Or oil injection? These two technologies can be used together to make two-stroke engines relatively clean.

Turbine? In a car?

Chrysler did this in the 1960s with some success. It could certainly be done today. Personally, as the sibling to my comment says, I would couple it electrically, thus eliminating the drive system entirely. You could use a SMALL battery bank or a supercapacitor ($$$) system to do regenerative braking, and provide power to start the turbine.

Using microturbines, you could probably solve most of the problems with turbine power, but eliminating the transmission solves the biggest problem, which is that turbines turn at very very high speeds and there is both loss due to gear friction and a tendency to blow up the transmission, if you have a transmission.

• Simple: a single moving part
  
• Clean burning from continuous combustion
  
• Multi-fuel capable
  

Trademark violation. Plymouth owns the "intellectual property rights".

http://www.turbinecar.com/scamp.htm

The Chrysler Turbine car:

http://www.turbinecar.com/turbine.htm

http://www.fourforty.com/turbine/

http://www.autospeed.com.au/A_0764/P_1/article.htm l

Another way to use a gas turbine would be to use it to generate electricity, which would then drive an electric motor, like trains do.

Also, simple Tesla bladeless turbines might be used in hybrid electric vehicles. See TEBA http://www.execpc.com/~teba/main.html, Phoenix Turbine Builders:

http://phoenixnavigation.com/ptbc/home.htm

The more likely reason for destroying the cars is tax reasons. It will make it easier for GM to write-off the $1 billion they spent on development and marketing.

Remember the Chrysler turbine car? Those were destroyed to avoid paying import duties.

Right, it was Chrysler, and it was hailed as the Car of the Future at the time.

Evidently, rather than price, the main roadblock was the pollutants the car emited.

An engine is really just an air pump except it operates in reverse.

There are two kinds of pump. Positive displacement, and non-positive displacement.

A turbine engine - like a jet engine or a gas turbine - is not a positive displacement pump. As a result, not all of the expanding gases serve to drive the impeller (which eventually drives the wheels). Continuing the pump analogy, this would be equivalent to a centrifugal pump (think of centrifugal water pumps found in major appliances and "biscuit blowers" you can get for your computer) or a conventional axial fan (ship's propeller, cute little fan that keeps your computer's power supply from cooking).

A piston or vaned pump is positive displacement - the slip past the piston rings or vanes is minimal. A conventional reciprocating car engine is equivalent to a piston pump like you'd find in an air compressor, while a Wankel is more like a vaned pump like you'd find in industrial machinery and any place where you have to pump a fluid against a head (large rise). (My grey water toilet uses a Wolfcraft drill pump, which is a kind of vane pump.)

Gas turbines lose due to slip through the turbine. Also, I don't think most people are too keen on having super-hot exhaust gases. (One of the most recent turbine cars was the Chrysler Turbine car; it was an experimental car abandoned in the early 1960s because there was no way to make the gas mileage even remotely reasonable. There is precisely one still in operating condition, and I saw it driving on the show grounds at a car show - sounds like a vacuum cleaner! *HOT* blast as it drives slowly past.)

Wankel rotaries are beautiful, but by the time anyone had figured out how to make end seals for the rotors, emissions laws had demanded better control of combustion chamber shape. That was nearly impossible to do with a rotary motor, given that the combustion chamber's shape is dictated by the need to contact the end seals. I'd love to see how Mazda did it in the new RX-8.

also:
http://www.turbinecar.com/