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

[random string of num]

gas turbines are more efficient than petrol or diesel or engines, as the joule cycle is more thermodynamically ideal. The only problem is they prefer to operate at a continuous power output. Rover tried doing this in the 30's with Whittle's jet, but that was a disaster, the advances in electrical drive trains may have fixed this. still its pretty cool.

Re:Should be reliable

[Adrian Harvey]

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.

Turbo-electric (ie: turbine->electric->motors) are quite efficent, and commonly used in large equipment, like boats and trains (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turbo-electric)

The difficulties here will be
1. how efficent the battery is, and how much the battery is used verses running in direct turbo-electric mode.
2. How well the turbine has been scaled down. Turbines get harder to make efficent the smaller they are - efficency is quite dependent on things like the ratio of the gap at the edge of the blades to the blade area. Small turbines need a lot more precision manufacturing to make properly efficent. A good single-cycle gas turbine such as this one: http://www.geoilandgas.com/businesses/ge_oilandgas/en/literature/en/downloads/LM6000.pdf can get 42% efficency, but small models often languish at 25% or so. [NB: combined cycle can get you as high as 60% but I will be *very* surprised if they've crammed that into a car... though they did say 2 turbines....]

All the same, I still want one!

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:Should be reliable

[CyberDragon777]

the tendency to singe the paint off cars that approached too close to the exhaust.

A car that automatically enforces the proper following distance? I want one!

Re:Should be reliable

[L4t3r4lu5]

Apologies, 28%. It's obvious what I got wrong.

Re:Should be reliable

[Pharmboy]

They revamped the EPA methodology a few years ago, which pushed the ratings down for most cars, so it is a bit more accurate. And locking transmissions only affect highway mileage was my point. Yes, they have been around for two decades, but not on all cars. They are much more common now. The main point is that the difference in actual MPG between an automatic and a manual transmission, assuming the same driver and roads, is much smaller than it used to be two decades ago, and in some cases there is virtually no difference. Bank Rate has an article on it, and others do as well, showing the difference is usually minimal or non-existant.

A step in a right direction

[elh_inny]

THe 'early adopters' in car's world, the afficcinados, like Jeremy Clarkson will not go for a boring hybrid unless it gives them better thrill than a conventional gas guzzling supercar.
If this car is really fun to drive, it will be in demand, the markup on luxury is usually quite high, which means there's budget to develop something more mainstream with similar tech...

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.

Re:A step in a right direction

[GameboyRMH]

Actually there's nothing "funny" or ironic about it at all (I hate it when people say things like that). In most cases technologies that can make a car perform better, often with no efficiency gain or even at the cost of efficiency, can make a car more efficient if applied differently. Even in areas like handling that would seem to have no application on the street. If you could take highway ramps at full highway speed you wouldn't have to waste a load of energy by slowing down - of course it wouldn't be comfortable for the passengers.

So the technologies that translate most quickly and directly from race cars to boring street sedans (even the slightly sporty-looking ones they still call "sports cars") are in the powertrain and aerodynamics areas.

Re:A step in a right direction

[GameboyRMH]

Your post is sort of like saying that no NASA technologies make it into everyday life because we don't have space shuttles in our driveways.

BTW some cars within a mere mortal's budget that have robotized manual gearboxes with auto rev matching include the Toyota MR-S and Mitsubishi Evo 10, just off the top of my head. Many Audis have it as well (Audi DSG system). The Nissan 370Z also has auto rev matching with a stick-shift manual.

Re:A step in a right direction

[leonardluen]

so it is very much like computers isn't it? nothing you see in the desktop (the powerhouse equivalent of a racecar) makes it to a laptop (the consumer model)

that processor you see in the desktop? no, that takes too much power the battery in the laptop could never handle it. that awesome video card in the desktop? no, that runs too hot, the laptop would overheat. well how about that harddrive? too big, there isn't space to put it in the laptop.

Just because the parts aren't able to move directly from the desktop to the laptop doesn't mean that desktop technology doesn't contribute anything to a laptop, or in your example race car to commercial car. yes they do need to put extra work into it to convert some of the technologies, they need to extend the lifetime of the part, reduce the heat, or miniaturize it, but that doesn't mean that they didn't learn anything when they developed it for the high performance system first.

Re:A step in a right direction

[Spectre]

Almost no race technology makes it into contemporary cars. Pretty much everything in racing is designed to last a race or two and then be replaced, so it's designed for minimum weight and maximum power output, and only enough longevity to make it through the necessary races

Nope, never. Except for:

Electronic ignition
Electronically-controlled fuel injection
Rack-and-pinion steering
Disk brakes
Electric radiator fans
Variable valve timing
Radial tires
And about everything else that is now considered "normal" on a car ...

Really...

[Cornwallis]

"Jaguar has developed a hybrid car that runs on gas turbines."

How many miles-per-gas-turbine does it get and how many gas turbines are needed to fill the tank?

Re:Really...

[c6gunner]

For anyone actually looking for some answers though, the article doesn't say anything about its actual fuel efficiency.

Um, yes it does. It says it'll get something like 66 miles on electric, and has a combined range of about 560 miles. Leaving aside the electric bit, that means you're getting roughly 500 miles for 16 gallons, or 31.25 miles per gallon. Assuming their figures are correct.

Re:Very Cool

[somersault]

Also, I wonder what happens if one or more of the electric motors goes bad or stop working for any reason.

I'm taking a wild guess here, but I'm thinking you probably will need to get it fixed.

Agreed

[Errol backfiring]

Gas turbines are powerful for their weight, but not exactly economical in fuel use. The power-to-weight ratio makes them suitable for aircraft, but for cars they are just a thirsty show-off.

Re:What about noise pollution?

[Anonymous Coward]

You and I sir must have a different opinion of how freaking awesome a jet engine sounds.

Re:Very Cool

[Anonymous Coward]

Unlike an American V8, which continues to put out awesome amounts of power even after it breaks.

Re:The downside...

[MichaelSmith]

Also after years of research Jaguar found a way to make a gas turbine leak oil.

Re:Very Cool

[Bert64]

You will most likely have reduced performance, especially if the rest of the car has to spin the defective motor, but it should still run...

When Jaguar were still producing V12 engines, it was quite common for people to not change the rear pair spark plugs (they are quite hard to reach because of the size of the v12 and the dimensions of the engine bay) so after a while they would be running on only 10 cylinders.

"I shit the bed"

[PolygamousRanchKid]

Gas turbines are powerful for their weight, but not exactly economical in fuel use.

A friend of mine was a tank commander in the US army. He complained about the reliability of the gas turbine engines in the M1 Abrams tanks. When they break down, oil gets into the turbine, and spews itself around.

Over the radio, when your tank breaks down, you say, "I shit the bed."

On the other hand, he was really impressed with the German Leopard tank. It just uses a turbo diesel engine, so it is not so sexy, but seems to get the job done.

Re:Very Cool

[c6gunner]

Its awesome that it can run on diesel, biofuel, natural gas, or LP. I wonder if it can run on a combination, or if you can only have one type of fuel at a time.

It's a jet turbine - you could mix all 4 and throw in some Tang for good measure, and it'll still run. Of course, you'll get decreased performance and some funky looking exhaust, but it'll run.

Re:Very Cool

[Suki I]

Unlike an American V8, which continues to put out awesome amounts of power even after it breaks.

Or a European V12 that generates massive repair bills, running or not.

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.

Re:The problem with safety systems like that

[dave420]

Because right now cars don't have anything dangerous in them, running for the length of the car... :) I'd hazard a guess that wearing thick rubber gloves and an insulating suit (which fire fighters already do, as they deal with lots of dangerous stuff all the time) would offer pretty decent protection, unless the fire fighter in question is chewing on an exposed cable while simultaneously rubbing his dick on the road...

Re:The problem with safety systems like that

[thegarbz]

There is a very VERY big difference between cloths protective equipment rated for heat and wear and protective equipment rated for power. The materials are very different, have a different rated maximum safe voltage and are inspected differently. If you wore on a construction site while doing live low voltage power work you'll likely find yourself escorted off site.

Re:The problem with safety systems like that

[roman_mir]

unless the fire fighter in question is chewing on an exposed cable while simultaneously rubbing his dick on the road...

- for some reason I actually pictured it in my head and now I am having a day-time nightmare! WTF did you do that for?

Re:The problem with safety systems like that

[PopeRatzo]

If something goes wrong at 205 mph?

I know it makes me sound like a pussy, but I really don't want anyone doing 205mph at least until they fix the potholes.

Re:The problem with safety systems like that

[dfghjk]

"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."

How is that different than having one motor and computer-controlled multi-wheel drive and braking systems?

Re:The problem with safety systems like that

[tvsjr]

It's frightening that someone modded you insightful.

Vehicle extrications are death-traps for firefighters. Just to name a few issues:
Shocks in bumpers, prone to send the bumper flying off the car at knee height
Rollover bars, prone to release at the wrong time and pummel anything in its path (already killed more than one FF)
Chemical airbags, which can cause injury or burns
Stored-gas airbags and their cylinders and tubing - not good to cut into a ~3Kpsi cylinder
High-voltage cables in hybrids
Magnesium and springs in steering columns
Hood and tailgate struts, prone to overheating and exploding
Fuel tank, fuel lines, etc.
And more...

Our bunker gear is insulating... from HEAT, not electricity. I carry a few different types of gloves (structural, extrication, work gloves for hose rolling) - none of them are rubber or insulating from electricity either. There is nothing in a firefighter's typical equipment that will provide any significant protection from electricity. Cutting a high-voltage cable in a hybrid will result in significant injury at best... death at worst.

Re:The problem with safety systems like that

[afidel]

If something goes wrong at 205 mph? well, in that case you don't have to worry how to cut open the car, because the driver is probably very dead. solves that problem.

Why do people assume all or even a majority of accidents at tripple digits are fatal? NASCAR has several crashes at near 200mph every year and yet it's been a decade since they've killed a driver or even seriously injured one. Granted they have the advantage of designing the obstacles the car can hit, but as an accident earlier this year showed they still end up with some unprotected surfaces that can end with sudden deceleration.

Re:The problem with safety systems like that

[tvsjr]

No. Why would we?

One of the key components to any fire department is mutual aid - we help each other out. We do similar things with external entities. I need high voltage cut off? I call the power company. I know of no specialized "high voltage" unit or response team in any FD anywhere in the world, save for some industrial fire departments working at large power generation facilities.

We will strip a meter out of a box as a last resort, but we prefer letting the power company handle it. They're trained for it, they have the equipment (which they know how to inspect properly), etc. If we have an electrical hazard, we make a risk/reward decision and try to work around it. If the structure is fully involved and we either know everyone has been evacuated (per the homeowner) or we see that the conditions are not compatible with life, then we won't take a big chance. If we know there are three kids trapped in a bedroom, we'll work around the hazard as best we can to effect the rescue. Firefighting is a series of these decisions - is the amount of potential "good" worth a given amount of peril to my life and the lives of my crew?

Now, think about a crunched-up car, especially a little microbox like a Prius. The guys who work on HV for a living don't have "suits" - they have proper clothing, long insulating gloves, insulating boots, etc., along with tools that do their best to keep them away from the high voltage where possible. Ever tried a set of lineman's gloves on? You can forget any fine motor control. Now, think about what happens when you have no fine motor control and you need to mount an effective rescue on a car that's been crunched badly, while people sit inside bleeding to death. As it is, we are issued additional equipment for vehicle extrication and wildland firefighting (dual certified gear) - jumpsuit, gloves, lightweight helmet. The typical structural firefighting PPE is simply too big and bulky, and it impairs movement to the point that working with hand tools, rescue tools, etc. becomes very difficult. Lineman's gear would be even more of a problem.

Plus, how much gear do you carry? As it is, for my personal gear (this is what's in my locker, not counting what lives on the apparatus), I have:
Full set of structural PPE (coat, pants, suspenders, boots, helmet with light/band/wedges, 2 pairs of gloves, medical gloves, hand tools, rope bag, search loop, additional flashlight, etc.)
Full set of extrication/wildland PPE (jumpsuit, gloves, helmet, hand tools, flashlight, medical gloves, rope bag)
Handheld radio, another flashlight or two, more tools, etc.

I carry all of this every time we get a call (about 700 calls a year, I average 50-60%, all volunteer). Add too much more and we'll need a second truck to carry all of the gear!

Re:The problem with safety systems like that

[mangu]

I don't know what voltage you have in a Prius, but I'm an electrical engineer and I'm pretty certain that any sort of rubber gloves, even those very thin ones worn by surgeons, will keep you safe from the voltages found in an electric car.

Other turbine-powered cars

[drinkypoo]

In the 1960s Chrysler developed a turbine engine and drove a car across the country on it. They also had a test program with a limited group. Driving it was similar to a diesel, in that it had a startup procedure one had to follow, but it otherwise operated normally. It got significantly better mileage than cars of the day with excellent performance, but it killed gearboxes rapidly.

More recently and more similarly to this project, Langford Performance Engineering of Wellingborough England modified the Ford S-Max seven seat crossover vehicle into a series hybrid plug in vehicle with a [capstone] C30 turbine, achieving over 80 mpg equivalent in early test driving. This made it a series hybrid like the upcoming Chevy Volt, but more efficient.

Re:Other turbine-powered cars

[dpilot]

I remember hearing about some of the problems with this, and another. A turbine also happens to be wonderful gyroscope, so Chrysler's Turbine Car (I remember seeing the TV commercials as a kid.) had an embedded gyroscope which interfered somewhat with steering. Obviously arranging the axis of the turbine correctly can take care of this, but might make it more difficult to extract power from the engine. When I heard that this new car had 2 turbines, especially after reading about the difficulty of scaling turbines downward, I thought "counter-rotating" to mitigate the gyroscopic effects.

I also have an old high-school friend that has the gearbox problem. He travels to tractor-pull competitions with his jet-powered tractor. Last I talked to him, his #1 maintenance item was the gearbox. No matter what you did, high power plus high RPMs just makes for a tough problem. I also saw the engine room of the battleship Massachusetts at Fall River, Ma. It was steam turbine powered, and the gearbox was several times the size of the turbine.

Using the turbine to drive a generator instead of trying to directly extract mechanical power out of it solves a lot of problems. But from some other reading, I get the impression that they still gear the turbines down, preferring to generate electricity at about 1800 rpm instead of the direct 30-40 krpm. Makes me wonder about the difficulties of high-rpm electrical generation, and how tough that would be to solve.

Re:Other turbine-powered cars

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

A plain gas turbine driving a land vehicle is impractical due to turbo lag. Gas turbines respond too slowly for throttle settings. Everyone knows about the turbo lag in the turbo-supercharged gas/diesel engines. Jay Leno has a motorcycle made from an Airforce surplus helicopter gas turbine engine. That thing runs so smoothly with nary a vibration, you would not know the machine is running unless you stand on the exhaust path. But he was saying, "There is a 0.5 sec turbo lag. You twist the throttle, the machine thinks you have suggested a speed increase, and a committee decides to approve of it and then it starts accelerating rapidly. And remember the lag is on the other end too. You shut the throttle off, and the machine produces power for another half a second before decelerating" (paraphrased. not exact words of Jay).

Re:Other turbine-powered cars

[mangu]

if you're living on the equator.

DO you mean diesels run in the opposite direction south of the equator?

Re:Why not a jet pack?

[somersault]

I'm not talking about fantasy limit, was just talking real money. I don't think having a jetpack is a fantasy. If I properly wanted one I would get one, but if I'm going to be either spending a windfall or getting into debt, then it goes house, car, jetpack.

TURBINE does not equal JET

[BubbaDave]

Dammit!

That is all.

Dave

Re:Very Cool

[Vectormatic]

now where is the +1 awesome mod when i need it?

i can just imagine, blitzing across the german autobahn at 120mph in your Britisch Racing Green JJAAAGGGGG with psychedelic orange/green/yellow/pink smoke billowing out the back :P

Re:Why not a jet pack?

[PopeRatzo]

I'm not too sure what your fantasy budget limit is; but mine kind of covers a house and a jet pack.

So "a six-pack and a pack of smokes" is thinking too small?

Re:Very Cool

[ari_j]

A Lamborghini can run the quarter mile in 10 seconds, but the full mile takes 9 weeks because you have to hire a team of specialists to replace the clutch halfway through and, let's face it, they're Italian so they're not going to work too fast on the job.

Re:A Prius can do 205 mph?

[Gordonjcp]

I didn't know a Prius could do 205 mph.

It can do 0-60 in 2.6 seconds if you find a high enough cliff.

Re:What about noise pollution?

[name_already_taken]

And you must never have worked on a flightline or have any idea how loud a B-52 or a C-5A is.

I'm hoping the Jaguar car uses slightly smaller engines than those gargantuan military aircraft.

Re:Abrams A1 Tank

[wagnerrp]

1) It uses gas. (and everything else uses diesel, so you have to carry another thing around logistically)

Completely wrong. Like most other gas turbine engines, it can run on just about anything. It can run on gasoline, diesel, or any blend of kerosene. The US Army runs theirs on JP-8, jet fuel, as that simplifies their logistics. The Australian Army runs theirs on diesel, as that simplifies their logistics.

4) It is really LOUD. (considering its a tank, that's sayin' something!)

From what I've heard, it's actually surprisingly quiet. The loudest thing you hear is the noise of its tracks, rather than the diesel engines of traditional armored vehicles.

however you're still dependent on oil, so I see this as a complicated confusing step backwards.

No, you are dependent on combustible fuel. You can run a gas turbine on just about anything that is fluid and burns. This can be traditional petroleum based fuels, methane, coal gas. The only thing you have to worry about is fuel with hard particulate, as that will tear up the hot section.

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.

Re:Very Cool

[instagib]

Sounds funny, but at that speed uptight Germans in Passat Diesels will pass you on your left, while nervously trying to explain through signs that your engine is kaputt.