Jaguar's Hybrid Jet-Powered Concept Car

An anonymous reader writes "Jaguar has developed a hybrid car that runs on gas turbines. The range extended vehicle usually uses four electric motors (one on each wheel) plus a lithium-ion battery pack for propulsion, but can achieve a performance boost from a pair of gas turbines mounted in the rear. Cnet UK reports the car can do 0-60 mph in 3.4 sec. (and 50-90 mph in 2.3 sec.) and reach 205 mph while emitting less CO2 than a Toyota Prius."

Comments

Should be reliable

[91degrees]

This thing has a dozen or so moving parts. Granted, the turbines move pretty damn fast but electric motors and generators are extremely reliable. Four indepenent motors and two turbines menas we have redundancy on top of that.

I'm a little suspicious of the emission claims though. How much of that is from plugin? I can't imagine turbine->electric->battery->motors is an efficient drive train.

Re:Should be reliable

[sadtrev]

The Rover gas-turbine car was almost ready for launch (in the mid-'60s). It was cleaner, quieter and potentially cheaper than cars with conventional reciprocating engine designs.
It did have two major disadvantages - unreliability due to brittleness of the heat exchanger, and
- the tendency to singe the paint off cars that approached too close to the exhaust.

Re:A step in a right direction

[RogueyWon]

It's funny how developments that reduce the environmental impact of cars often originate from the high-performance end of the spectrum. While I'm no expert, my understanding is that sports such as Formula 1 and Indycar have done massive amounts to improve the fuel efficiency of the cars you see on the roads every day. After all, there's a clear and direct incentive when you have a high performance car out on the track to design something that can carry a smaller (and lighter) fuel tank or get away with fewer refuelling stops. And once you've developed that technology, you might as well make good use of it on a commercial basis.

The problem with safety systems like that

[CFD339]

...tends to be that by definition, they only kick in when something is broken.

I used to climb a little bit. We'd be up on a thousand feet of exposure with just a thin nylon harness and some carefully tied rope. Now I'm a firefighter and have done some rope rescue classes. We don't even go on a steep hill without a far more complex (and heavy) harness system. It seemed ridiculous to me, but it was explained that if the usual way of doing things had worked then we wouldn't have been called in. Something has gone wrong, and we can't always know what it was.

The same problem exists, to us, for cars like the Prius. Lots of very high voltage cables running through parts of the car we would usually cut through to get someone out. In theory, there are safety systems that will cut power to those cables after an accident. In practice, what if the accident affected those cut-off systems? There's a manual cut-off -- I'd have to check the reference material we have, but I think it's under the back seat. If I could get to something under the back seat, I wouldn't need to cut the car apart.

When things are broken, they're ...well....broken. The safety systems may or may not be affected. I think the issue in this case is that broken at 65 miles per hour is one thing, and broken at 205 miles per hour is something else entirely.

I think if a car that was moving that fast being propelled by four independent motors suddenly found itself being propelled by thrust that was no longer balanced and centered -- I wouldn't want to be down range for quite some distance.

Rather than complex rules..

[dmgxmichael]

I've always thought that NASCAR in particular could reduce the thickness of their rulebook considerably by putting the teams on a fuel allowance for the race. If the cars start going too fast to be safe, pull back the fuel they are allowed to get.