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The Rise and Fall of America's Jet-Powered Car
Pickens writes "The WSJ reports that the automobile designs of the 1950s and 1960s were inspired by the space race and the dawn of jet travel. But one car manufacturer, Chrysler, was bold enough to put a jet engine in an automobile that ran at an astounding 60,000 rpm on any flammable fluid including gasoline, diesel, kerosene, jet fuel, peanut oil, alcohol, tequila, or perfume. Visionary Chrysler designer George Huebner believed that there was plenty to recommend the turbine. People loved the car. In a publicity scheme to promote its 'jet' car, Chrysler commissioned Ghia to handcraft 50 identical car bodies and each car would be lent to a family for a few months and then passed on to another. Chrysler received more than 30,000 requests in 1962 to become test drivers and eventually 203 were chosen who logged more than one million miles (mostly trouble free) in the 50 Ghia prototypes. In the end Chrysler killed the turbine car after OPEC's 1973 oil embargo. 'How different would America be now if we all drove turbine-powered cars? It could have happened. But government interference, shortsighted regulators, and indifferent corporate leaders each played a role in the demise of a program that could have lessened US dependence on Middle East oil.'"
... and it could have been the foundation for flying cars to boot.
The word, I think, is "turbine" (or even "jet turbine,")-- not "Jet powered".
How noisy were they?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
There was a recent post on a jet powered concept car... I wouldn't call the idea dead yet.
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/10/01/0039240/Jaguars-Hybrid-Jet-Powered-Concept-Car?from=rss
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I remember reading about Rover doing experiments with turbines in the 40s.
linky http://www.rover.org.nz/pages/jet/jet5.htm
Turbines suck at low RPM, have exotic acceleration modes and requirements and only shine at constant speed. What Detroit needed was a hybrid turbine-electric car, either in series or parallel. With today's electric technology, I'm surprised these haven't made a comeback. You'd have the best of both worlds. But with fuel at less than 3 USD per gallon, why bother?
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
It would make your sedan's fuel consumption put an HMMWV to shame. Regular diesel engines can also run on peanut oil. In fact that was the fuel Diesel himself used to demonstrate his engine. Gasoline engines can be easily modified to also run on ethanol. The issue with peanut oil, ethanol, or indeed any other fuel made from biomass is that you cannot make enough fuel to run the cars we use today even if you replaced all current farmland to produce fuel instead. So you propose to solve the problem by increasing fuel consumption even further? Madness.
In order for turbines to be successful someone needs to increase their efficiency further.
"But government interference, shortsighted regulators, and indifferent corporate leaders each played a role in the demise of a program that could have lessened US.dependence on Middle East oil."
Could have? I suppose. But it's highly unlikely. The fuel efficiency was poor. Reducing imports would have required development of an entirely new fuel stream other than gasoline. That's been a struggle despite many incentives.
Although, if it could run on tequila, I suppose every liquor store automatically turns into a rather expensive fuel station.
What happens to the 60,000 rpm turbine (and associated pieces) in an accident? Not good.
As long as Middle East countries do not own your oil pumps, rafineries and tanker ships.
http://opencm3.net, http://www.nongnu.org/gm2/
Because if it wasn't for "government interference", we'd have burned through all the world's oil supply on silly jet cars. /encourages more "government interference"
Gas turbines are very poorly suited for automobile use.
They're extremely expensive, have mediocre MPG, don't respond quickly to the gas pedal, and the gyroscopic effects are problematic.
That's why they didn't catch on-- no need to look for conspiracies.
gasoline, diesel, kerosene, jet fuel, peanut oil, alcohol, tequila, or perfume
Do you get a lemon or lime with that?
... and some salt?
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
The idea that the dependence on "Middle East oil" could have been lessened is seriously misleading. Gas turbine technology is best suited to very large installations. In an internal combustion engine, one needs a high compression ratio to get good thermal efficiency. In a gas turbine engine, this is most easily achieved by making a (very) large engine that runs at a relatively constant speed. There are major practical problems in making small high compression gas turbines (among other things, conventional axial or centrifugal flow compressors do not scale well to small sizes). The result is very poor fuel economy. Chrysler wasn't the only manufacturer to build a gas turbine powered car. Rover built one in the 1950's. At best these efforts demonstrated passable, but not exceptional performance coupled with VERY high fuel consumption. This may not have seemed like a big issue when oil was a few dollars a barrel. It would be completely unacceptable now, even if one allows for the flexibility of being able to use various types of fuels. There just isn't enough of any reasonable alternative fuel to operate existing private and commercial vehicle fleets, especially if there is a massive fuel consumption penalty.
At least we know that America was as stupid then as it is now.
A series hybrid car with turbine generators would rock! People have proposed additional generator modules for series hybrids which can be added as needed for long trips. Turbine modules could be made small, so that they could recharge your vehicle while parked during the day, though this wouldn't be the most efficient use of the fuel. Conversely, one could add additional turbine modules for specific purposes, like towing cargo or driving on very steep roads. Cars would become configurable!
Reading throught the comments, I see it was described as being quite quiet, so apparently noise was not the issue. 11.5 miles per gallon, though, that's not a good number, even by standards of the time. The article starts out "Turbines were the bucking broncos of the engine world: loud and hard to control, gulping vast quantities of fuel and air.". Looks like they solved the noise problem (except for that "turbine whine" described), but the "gulping vast quantities of fuel" wasn't so easily solvable.
This is the key sentence: "The primary culprit was OPEC's 1973 oil embargo and the panicked response of federal regulators, who set unrealistic standards to limit fuel consumption and air pollution."
Unrealistic? What exactly does that word mean? All of the car manufacturers managed to meet the fuel efficiency goals: all of them. And, it turns out, it wasn't even really very hard. The pollution goals as well. And its hardly true that "the Environmental Protection Agency required tailpipe emissions to be cleaner than the ambient air." Maybe the "ambient air" in polluted cities. I remember the air in those days-- I'm quite happy to have today's pollution standards, thank you. Twice as many cars in America as there were in 1963, but the air is much cleaner.
In any case, though, this is just the Wall Street Journal's sliding in a political opinion in the guise of a fact. The cars were made in 1962, and the article states "Most of the cars—46 of them—were destroyed in 1967." I don't think you can blame the OPEC Oil embargo of 1973 for the failure of the design six years previously. Perhaps the WSJ should have paid attention to this sentence: "Yes, turbine engines were expensive to mass produce."
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
http://www.capstoneturbine.com/prodsol/
I'm not rich, but some /.ers are. Hang one of these in a hybrid and have at it.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
At least we know that America was as stupid then as it is now.
FTFA:
The turbine engines required some unusual manufacturing processes, but the team hoped those issues, which would be quite expensive to resolve, could be addressed after they had proved the viability of the turbine cars.
And ...
So, it looks like to me that production costs would be through the roof and the cars would guzzle gas.
Just because it's cool technology doesn't mean it's practical.
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
"But government interference, shortsighted regulators, and indifferent corporate leaders..."????? How about technological issues like hot exhaust gasses coming out the tail of the engine?
Don't you think that, if it actually were technologically feasible and Chrysler was gonna make a bundle of money, that it would happen. I just don't understand how government gets blamed for all the failures of business.
Trains don't need rapid acceleration, but they do need efficient cruising speeds...
Currently the trend seems to be towards low-speed driverless centrally controlled 'people pods' rather than anything actually exciting.
Who would have thought we would have diverged from the path of making continually more badass cars towards trying to develop boring things such as the Google ATNMBL.
I suppose whats going on with cars now is a similar to the of taking control from users as in "curated computing". The Chrysler turbine car is a genuinely cool piece of machine, probably my favourite car of all time, I really wouldnt mind seeing it back in limited production despite its lack of practicality.
Turbine technology isn't a complete waste however. A an electric car could have a removable ~30kW microturbine + fuel tank unit for long journeys and use it for storage space or extra batteries for the rest of the time.
That's a pretty sad end for an awesome sounding car.
"There is a way that seems right to a man, but its end is the way of death." Proverbs 16:25 (NKJV)
When I was in high school, my neighbor applied to 'test' of "Chrysler's turbine cars for 3 months. She had to write an essay explaining why she wanted to participate. The car was beautifully futuristic for its time and everything else seemed rather pedestrian. She took my brother and I on a ride in it just once. The experience consisted of a tour of the engine compartment, a trip to the newly-opened McDonalds, and a stop to fill up from a kerosene, gravity-fed tank that a local gas station had installed just for this Chrysler. I remember that the car sound like a household vacuum cleaner only a bit louder. You could easily have a conversation while stand next to the car. Inside the car, it was even quieter. Much of the car was fabricated from aluminum and we were warned not to put our weight on places (the tube-like console, for instance) lest we dent it. The car idled at approximately 10,000 RPM and it had a tach, which I remember watching in fascination. The turbine produce approximately 140 HP, so performance was ordinary. Our neighbor was worried about letting the car sit in one spot for too long as the exhaust was hot enough to melt asphalt. The turbine itself was wired against tampering. All the bolts had little wires threaded through the heads that were then attached to the component the bolt was used in. The car drove quite normally and the only indication it was powered by anything other the a standard IC engine was the vacuum cleaner-like sound it produced.
And better
The Rover Gas Turbine car.
And they even took part in the Le Mans 24 Hour race more than once too.
Two Rover gas-turbime cars (T3 and 4) survive in running order, Jet-1 is in the London Science Museum.
Looking at the Chrysler effort, it looks like a "Jetsons" futuristic affair, the Rover cars looked like completely conventional cars of the time - indeed the T4 body shape was to see the roads as the P6 Rover 2000.
You know, you'd think the bloody Yanks invented the jet engine too......
Maintaining the streetcar systems instead of dismantling them and not incentivizing suburbanization would've been a better idea than some stupid jet car
There is a problem with these engines in that they don't idle. So how about using them to generate electric energy and store it in the car and then use that electric energy to run the electric motors?
The car wouldn't need to have the turbine on all the time, only to generate enough power for the next hour or so and store it into the batteries or flywheels. Actually turbine could be used to accelerate flywheels much faster than topping up electrical batteries.
You can't handle the truth.
If you want to see one of these fantastic cars, there's one on display at the St. Louis Museum of Transportation. I love that place; loads of trains, cars and all manner of awesome transportation stuff (even some boats)... and one of the turbine cars is still on display there. I ended up signing up for a membership to the place because my 10 year old son loved it so much.
I think the technology in this thing was awesome... hell, I even love the styling in a retro sort of way. I would have jumped at the opportunity to buy and own a turbine powered car... and though I'm sure the fuel mileage wasn't fantastic, the fact that it could run on just about anything meant that you could have filled it up with whatever was cheapest at the time and used that to get to work. I'm sure that might still happen again; the age of the turbine car may only be in limbo... not over.
Jay Leno has a turbine powered motorbike as well (http://www.bikemenu.com/turbine.html). I remember reading an article he wrote about it that made me laugh; that it was often interesting to sit at a set of lights and look in the rear view mirror and watch the front bumper of the car behind him melting because of the heat output...
I haven't been there in 15 years but the Detroit Historical Museam had one on display.
Space Nuttery. The ludicrous ideas like:
1) Colonies on the Moon and/or Mars. Completely ridiculous; there's nothing there. Getting there is already a feat in itself.
2) Giant space stations... Tin cans barely above LEO are about the best we can do. Guess what? Our bodies aren't meant for free-fall for prolonged periods.
3) Space-based solar power... Utterly impractical, electricity is cheap already on Earth, you can't justify using 10 units of energy to build and deploy such a structure to get one unit back.
4) Asteroid mining... So utterly fantastical and deluded. As long as there are third world countries with cheap labor and poor safety practices, it's always cheaper to send poor people digging than rich countries launching entire mining operations into space. Also, there's nothing up there that we don't already have down here.
The lesson here is that there are limits. Limits were something the post-WWII, cheap energy and war-driven technology society didn't really think about. The zenith of that attitude was Apollo 11. Which was awesome and everything, but really, space is so utterly huge and empty and desolate, and we are so small, powerless and fragile.
So here we are, social-networking with tiny transistors, but still using the same roads, houses, cars and planes as back then, with improvements, sure, but the "giant leaps" era that the 20th century represented is over. Will there be a similar jump from local horse-based transportation to nation-wide car networks? If so, what is it?
The OPOC engine shows more promise for a sudden breakthrough in fuel economy.
Lighter, less moving parts and runs on diesel.
Initial it is being designed for trucks and large vehicles, but coupled with a CVT or even as the engine of a hybrid, smaller models would be ideal for autos.
http://www.autoinsane.com/2009/03/09/news/tech/video-revolutionary-opposed-cylinder-opposed-piston-engine/
Never answer an anonymous letter. - Yogi Berra
The biggest problem with turbine powered cars was coupling to the wheels. Turbines have two unfortunate properties that make them very unsuited to directly driving the wheels of a car:
1) They spin far too fast, so you have to have a transmission to slow that down.
2) they don't like to slow down too much, so you have to have some means to clutch them so starting from a stop won't stall them.
In applications like helicopters, that's not a big deal: once you have the rotors turning, you'd like to keep them turning.
But for cars it was a deal-breaker.
I highlight was because there is a better idea on the block:
http://www.capstoneturbine.com/prodsol/solutions/hev.asp
The idea Capstone has is that you have a single spindle turbine, with a generator on the same shaft as the turbine. There is no mechanical coupling of torque to the wheels - the system makes electricity. That works well with an electric drive train - electric motors have no problems with making torque at zero RPM, they have a wide torque band that reduces or eliminates the need for a transmission, and the turbine can be started and stopped as needed to maintain the batteries. The Capstone turbines don't need lubrication as they use air bearings, and they meet or beat all the air quality standards on the books or planned to be on the books, running on diesel.
I just hope somebody gets smart, and makes a van chassis on this tech, with different bodies for Suzy Soccermom, UPS, Class-C motorhomes, and basic transportation, that uses heat pumps + resistive heating for climate control (so that it can run off the traction battery without needing to run the turbine to make heat), and that gives me access to 120VAC@50A from the traction batteries (plus an inverter, naturally) so that I can use it for camping as needed.
(no, I neither work for nor own stock in Capstone - I just think this is the way things need to go.)
www.eFax.com are spammers
Yeah, I went to Romania in the late 90s and the city I was in reminded me of Miami without emissions controls. Outside, the gas and diesel fumes were thick and inside everyone smoked. By the time my week there was up, my lungs ached for clean air. I'll be glad to take our "unrealistic air pollution standards," TYVM.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
I have often this was also an issue with a hover car. If we are constantly providing a normal force to keep the car, say, 50 centimeters above the ground, then for a typical car this would be 5000 joules or W*s. Given the standard inefficiencies, a gallon of gas might give one 20-30 minutes of flight. Around here where many people commute an hour, this would add 20 gallons a week to consumption, which would more than double the fuel needed. As this energy consumption would rise linearly with mass, this doubling relationship would persist. Aa such we have a cool technology that makes no sense from an energy point of view.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Except GM dismantled most of them so they can sell more buses.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
"George Huebner pointed out that the Environmental Protection Agency required tailpipe emissions to be cleaner than the ambient air".
The old scheme: If you do not like it, ridicule it by making unfair comparisons in some metric making it sound absurd.
(My favorites are comparing bacterial pollution of something with a normal toilet. Now if it had more bacteria than a keyboard, then *I* would be scared..)
This approach (using battery power topped up by a small turbine) would seem to make more sense given turbine engine characteristics (poor idle performance etc.)
http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/10/10/01/0039240/Jaguars-Hybrid-Jet-Powered-Concept-Car?from=rss
I once challenged an engineer buddy to come up with a working concept for a hydrogen car and he cited turbines that generated power for electric motors at each individual wheel (because the turbine always has a consistent amount of fuel flowing from it, your throttle wouldn't regulate fuel but the electric motors). It makes sense, but they're quite a different beast than traditional piston-rod motors. While technically it wouldn't be too difficult, economic and logistical factors are the great barriers. Safety is another factor. He didn't seem too concerned about it, but hydrogen can make a hell of an explosion.
Whether it would work or not, that's the type of outside-the-box thinking our car manufacturers need today. The idea of electric cars is just stupid unless you live in an area provided with nuclear power. Where I live the power is provided by a coal plant. Am I really supposed to believe that it's better for the environment to plug my car in and burn a fossil fuel at a foreign site than within the car itself? Sure, there are problems associated with getting hydrogen in cars, but no one seems to even be trying.
"From the depths of my skeptical and rationalist soul, I ask the Lord to protect me from California touchie-feeliedom."
not to mention US oil imports from the middle east has never exceeded 20%
http://www.allthebestbits.net/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/us-oil-imports3.gif
--- widget evolution: enhanced, plus, super, ultra, extreme, exxxtreme, ultra-extreme,
Looks like they solved the noise problem (except for that "turbine whine" described), but the "gulping vast quantities of fuel" wasn't so easily solvable.
Today, however, a gas turbine connected to a generator to charge the batteries for a pure-electric drive car might be a feasible solution, as it would allow the turbine to only run at full load, and thus achieve its best efficiencies.
I suppose a hybid could work, too, again with the turbine only running when the vehicle needs a lot of power, but then you get into transmission losses that you could avoid with a pure electric motor drive.
> How different would America be now if we all drove turbine-powered cars
LOL. A turbine uses between 60 and 70% of it's full-throttle fuel use while standing still. The compressor soaks up a lot of power. They're fine for systems that operate at high power levels all the time, or where power-to-weight is the only major consideration, but for auto use they're useless. Hybrids fix this, but they didn't have LiIon batteries in the 50/60's.
> single spindle turbine, with a generator on the same shaft as the turbine
Use a Wankel. All the same advantages. They're even replacing turbines for APUs.
Maury
Reducing imports would have required development of an entirely new fuel stream other than gasoline. That's been a struggle despite many incentives.
The reason for the USA's continuing dependence on Middle East oil is simply that there were, and still are, far too many very wealthy people with good connections into the US political class (Reps. and Dems. being equally guilty) who are making way too much money off of the USA's addiction to Middle East oil for the concept of US energy independence to become a reality. I don't see it happening until we permanently cross the pain threshold on fuel prices. By then the transition to alternative energy sources will be a painful and expensive one. However, until then conservative middle class America will continue to sing the praises of the Oil companies.
Dependence on Mideast oil? That's bullshit. The majority of U.S. comes from Canada, Mexico and Nigeria. It could stop importing oil from the Mideast tomorrow if it really wanted to, but doesn't probably for political reasons.
http://www.eia.doe.gov/pub/oil_gas/petroleum/data_publications/company_level_imports/current/import.html
The pursuit of absolute tolerance leads to the most rigorous and ludicrous intolerance. - REX MURPHY
Travelling to other countries, particularly areas of China and India, can really drive home how low the pollution is in most parts of America. There are times that I can't see more than 100 yards down the street and this is due to the air pollution from the cars and factories.
The Dymaxion car was a concept car designed by U.S. inventor and architect Buckminster Fuller in 1933.] The word Dymaxion is a brand name that Fuller gave to several of his inventions, to emphasize that he considered them part of a more general project to improve humanity's living conditions. The car had a fuel efficiency of 30 miles per US gallon. It could transport 11 passengers. While Fuller claimed it could reach speeds of 120 miles per hour, the fastest documented speed was 90 miles per hour.
Then there is this:
In his 1988 book The Age of Heretics, author Art Kleiner maintained that the real reason why Chrysler refused to produce the car was because bankers had threatened to recall their loans, feeling that the car would destroy sales for vehicles already in the distribution channels and second-hand cars.
What one fool can do, another can. (Ancient Simian Proverb)
In programming we have the logical AND... This means there could be jet-powered cars, basically, at the same time as common cars. Give or take a timeslice...
From a dead-stop, such as at a stop light...
I.E./E.G.-> You had to wait a LONG time before traffic started "moving" if a jet turbine vehicle was in front at a stop during a red-light for instance, before you could get going/moving, because of the "latency" of jet turbine vehicles during their init. startup from red stop lights...
APK
P.S.=> Heh, this also makes me wonder if the jet exhaust would burn, or even mar, the car behind it while it was moving, & especially from a stop light where all the cars are pretty close to one another? apk
See the documentary "Who Killed the Electric Car".
Gas turbines are light and powerful and can run on just about any flammable liquid. Good.
Gas turbines require exotic materials, are thirsty, and have (by car standards) dismal acceleration. Bad.
If you gave them some research money I'm sure the aerospace people could come up with better answers on the materials, and maybe rethink the fuel systems for better fuel consumption. The solution for the acceleration is probably a serial hybrid - imagine a Chevy Volt with a miniature PT6 under the hood...
...laura
Maintaining the streetcar systems instead of dismantling them and not incentivizing suburbanization would've been a better idea than some stupid jet car
There is a lot of nonsense tossed about the decline of the streetcar.
Suburbanization begins with the commuter ferry, the bridge, the tunnel and the railroad.
You don't build the bridge to Brooklyn unless the traffic demands it.
The streetcar lines and suburban electric rail - "light rail lines" - were in deep financial trouble before World War I.
The joke at the time was that the Ford was cheaper per mile than a good pair of boots. You had portal-to-portal service. Room for four passengers, the family dog, and a week's worth of groceries from the new A&P.
The Ford came first. The paved road outside the city limits often much, much later.
If you want to know what drove suburbanization, don't look at GM, look at the telephone and rural electrification, Burpee Seeds, the supermarket and the Sears, Roebuck catalog.
Sears in the late teens and twenties would sell you a kit home at 6% interest that would cost maybe a third less than conventional construction. There is a handsome surviving example not four blocks from where I live.
It's not hard to see the appeal for any middle class family.
@vlm maybe ur shitty car. My #corvette hwy mpg = 2 x city mpg
Well, that's because a Corvette has a low drag coefficient, so there's not a huge aerodynamic penalty for highway speeds, but has an absurdly oversized engine, which is lousy at low speeds. So it's the city mpg that's shitty.
What would be a great car for MPG would be a 'Vette body with a lightweight frame, and a 20 horsepower engine with a ten-speed transmission. That would rock! (Well, in terms of MPG it would. Not gonna be great for 0 to 60).
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
All of the car manufacturers managed to meet the fuel efficiency goals: all of them. And, it turns out, it wasn't even really very hard.
Do you know how they did that? They did it by not making enough of certain models to meet demands. For example,do you know why we have SUVs? Because there was a demand for a vehicle that could carry 4-6 people and some cargo. This demand had been met by station wagons, but station wagons were cars and were calculated as part of the original CAFE standards. Auto manufacturers could not meet the demand for station wagons and meet the CAFE standards. SUVs are "trucks" (at least the original ones were) and therefore were not counted as part of the fleet for purposes of CAFE. Minivans were developed for the same purpose. Both minivans and SUVs were developed to get around the CAFE standards because there was a demand for vehicles that if they were under the CAFE standards would have made it impossible for the auto manufacturers to meet those standards.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
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.
"All of the car manufacturers managed to meet the fuel efficiency goals: all of them. And, it turns out, it wasn't even really very hard. The pollution goals as well."
At least one met goals by increasing fuel consumption--the Mazda Wankel engine of the time became fuel inefficient to meet emission standards.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wankel_engine#Fuel_consumption_and_emissions
Basically, they added a secondary reaction chamber, injected more fuel, burned that off to meet emission standards, to meet emission standards because the engine design itself was inherently more efficient overall. Remember, the Wankel is a more power efficient design (2 continuous circular motions, versus the peak and valley stopping of a piston engine), has better power-weight ratio (reason why the Leman's race handicapped it), which overall makes it more efficient but not by weight to fuel consumption.
I also believe the modern version does something similar but in the actual combustion chamber cycle to blow of the unburnt fuel (I think has to do with changing the exhaust port locations and using a later spark firing to re-ignite leftover fuel--probably in the same link above).
In any case, given how few car manufacturers there were in the 1970s, what you are saying isn't much of a standard. Also explains why we are where we are today, with still inefficient engine designs, old engines, crappy hybrid mash ups, and overly broad government oversight instead of having simple, encompassing standards focused on piston engine designs.
It turns out there is a design that can match the Prius in mileage, reliability, pollution and cost that uses a an easy-to-manufacture, and highly reliable jet engine, rather than piston, to drive the generator. The guy who funded the ring laser gyro came up with most of the details in the 80s. Without the pollution control, which I just recently solved, the hybrid would have been higher mileage although the cost wouldn't have been that much better since the pollution control modification is so cheap. Jet engines are most efficient and reliable at a fixed RPM, so they're a natural match for hybrids.
Here. Pictures and everything for the curious.
Wasnt one of the 1st histories of Darwin Awards about someone putting a jet engine to a car and trying it in a desert or something like that? Even the movie started with that.
The part that interests me is they run an order of magnitude hotter than a normal engine. Hotter engine = higher carnot efficiency + less pollution but from what I understand they still got very shitty mileage. If we just used the engine as an electrical generator not to directly drive the vechicle I wonder what kind of effeciencies could be obtained? What about using ceramics in this configuration for piston engines?
P.S.=> Heh, this also makes me wonder if the jet exhaust would burn, or even mar, the car behind it while it was moving
Yes, it would. The metal bodies cars in the 1950s and 60s would probably only suffer scorched paint, but there are an awful lot of plastic bumpers out there now. Jay Leno's jet bike has a big warning sign on the back, IIRC.
Not a typewriter
First was fuel consumption, because turbines are only efficient at certain high speeds. Great for the interstate, but sucks for commuting and in the city.
The second was noise at speed. The faster they went, the noisier they were, especially behind them. If one can hear, one did not want to be behind a turbine car, especially at speed.
Instead of having the turbine drive the car, have it drive an electric generator. Have a small bank of batteries and use the electricity to drive motors at the hubs.
By decoupling the speed of the car from the speed of the turbine, the turbine can be run at its most efficient speed.
By getting rid of the transmission and replacing the weight with batteries, and having motors at the hubs, the acceleration and fuel consumption can be cut because the vehicle can run on batteries at slow speeds.
Atomic batteries to power, turbines to speed!
Turbine engines are great, and they can be made small. But not cheap. Turbine makers have tried over and over to build low-cost jet engines for light aircraft. After all, large aircraft have been exclusively turbine powered for half a century. But it seems that once you get down to the size for a light bizjet (5-6 passengers), the engines don't get significantly cheaper. The MiniJets web site has information about all known small jet aircraft engines. It's a story of great demo aircraft, with decades of frustration trying to get the cost down. Efforts continue to build a very light jet at a low cost.
The other big use for small gas turbines has been for small scale electric power production.
Then there's the idle problem. The Chrysler turbine car had a mechanical transmission, and the engine continued to consume fuel at a substantial rate at idle. Today, a hybrid approach would be used, stopping the engine entirely once the battery was charged. The Capstone microturbine, which is a good backup power source for data centers and hospitals, has been used in this role. There's is more of a bus sized unit, 30x60x70 inches. Again, the scaling-down problem strikes.
Gearing down from 50,000 rpm to less than 100 is tricky. Helicopters do it, but the transmission is one of the most expensive, failure-prone components in the design. A car would have an even bigger problem.
From what I read of this Jaguar though, it uses the turbines to power generators when it needs a charge and it's driven by electric motors on each wheel.
So there's no latency of motion.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
...with the turbine only running when the vehicle needs a lot of power...
It may be efficient, but I think people would find it disconcerting to have their engine turning on and off all the time.
My dad worked for Chrysler back then. He got to participate in a publicity stunt with the turbine car.
After alerting the TV network, he drove up to Rockefeller Center in the turbine car. In front of the cameras he poured a quart of Chanel No. 5 in the tank. Then he drove it all over Manhattan the rest of the day.
As an added twist, he did the whole thing on three wheels. He had removed one of the front wheels to demonstrate the superiority of Chrysler's torsion bar suspension.
I think the whole thing was very cool.
Well, somehow in Europe mass transportation managed to survive. And we have suburbs too.
Why? It's not like a piston engine that can wear more on startup than on normal operation. It's literally just spinning up the turbine.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
I suspect similar arguments were made for having gears shift without manual intervention, but people got use to the situation so thoroughly that only in niche markets is it even possible to sell a second-hand car with a manual transmission.
What part of "A well regulated militia" do you not understand?
But how tolerant would turbines be against the ordinary bumps and shocks of traveling on a road?
When you have a turbine spinning at high RPM, anything that bumps the damn thing hard enough can make it go out of whack.
In India, they've been selling a turbine-powered scooter since the 80s, but somebody just took a stationary turbine-generator and fitted into a scooter chassis.
A turbine-powered motorbike would be easier to develop than a car, and you might get much better acceleration.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0WLIVpi5gs#t=7m39s
Just don't get too cocky and put on an afterburner.
...if they were under the CAFE standards would have made it impossible for the auto manufacturers to meet those standards.
Manufacturers, meanwhile, would have been pressured (and incented) to built larger passenger vehicles to better standards of fuel economy, to take advantage of the new market for fuel-efficient medium-large vehicles in the window between CAFE-compliant cars and gas-guzzling, price-prohibitive light trucks. Remember, the nominal purpose for the light-truck loophole in CAFE was not to allow every household a cheap minivan; it was to avoid penalizing businesses (especially small businesses) for whom light trucks were a legitimate requirement for their work. The same goal could - and should - have been achieved through a directed tax deduction/credit, but American automakers were too heavily dependent on their high-margin light trucks, and their lobbyists hobbled CAFE's scope accordingly.
~Idarubicin
Many hybrids do that now and the complaints are few.
Learn to love Alaska
In 1967 Parnelli Jones was on the verge of winning the Indianapolis 500 in Andy Granitelli's Pratt & Whitney gas turbine racer, when a transmission part broke too close to the end of the race to recover from. So impressive was his performance that rather than risk having the race taken over by non-piston machine, they re-regulated turbines requiring them to have no more than 14 square inches of air intake, effectively crippling their performance. Parnelli commented at the time that he thought they could adapt and win anyway.
The facts of history and of mechanics remain. Turbines are one of those things suppressed, whether purposefully or not, by a status quo threatened.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
"But government interference, shortsighted regulators, and indifferent corporate leaders each played a role in the demise of a program that could have lessened US.dependence on Middle East oil."
I take exception with most of this statement from to the Journal. I have a strong suspicion that the first two had very little to do with the decision. According to this capsule history of Chrysler, "Between 1973 and 1974, Chrysler's auto production plummets by 26 percent," due to poor sales of the full-size cars they had invested in (including the turbine car) in the face of the 1970's oil shock. Methinks the Journel doth protest too much about "government interference" when most of the blame lies squarely with the management of Chrysler who, together with the rest of the industry during the day, made crappy decisions on which cars to back. They really didn't have much choice but to scale back on their experimental programs as they were hemorrhaging money. I know it's politically beneficial to the right to bash the government with these sorts of unfounded statements, but it's historically inaccurate. But then, anyone who actually sees Murdoch's Journal as a source of unbiased journalism these days is really a bit of a moron.
If you really want to understand the mind of the auto companies in that day, read The Reckoning by David Halberstam, which gives an insightful view of how auto companies were run in the fifties and sixties and how their bad management led to the supremecy of the foreign car in the US and how it almost led to the demise of the domestic auto industry in the seventies.
That is all.
I also thought that a turbine/electric car -- like the Chevy Volt--would be an ideal combo. The electric motor would power the wheels and the batteries would normally be charged by plugging in. However, if the batteries got low on the road the turbine would power up at full speed to charge the batteries and then shutdown. This would solve the probelm of turbines only being efficient at one speed. The turbine would run at it's design RPM while the batteries charge, and the turbine could be rated for optimal battery charging.
I'm guessing that cost is the problem, that there aren't any cheap turbine. Although http://waoline.com/detente/hobby/HobbyTurbines.htm sell model airplane turbunes, but I'm guessing they have terrible fuel economy.
No, that is not true. American car companies did that with station wagons, which did fall under the CAFE standards. They raised the price to the point that most people who had a legitimate need for them could not afford them. Car companies raised the prices of station wagons to a point that many people who wanted/needed them could not afford them.
A family with three or more children will need to take two vehicles to go on a family vacation if they cannot afford a station wagon/SUV/minivan. That is in no way more efficient than them using a station wagon/SUV/minivan. It is probably significantly less efficient.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Why are they used for electricity generation if they're inefficient?
Utilities who burn natural gas do it in turbines, not piston engines.
As I remember it, the 80s station wagon got phased out in favor of the 90s minivan, which, loaded down with all the options, could get very expensive. But a sensible minivan wasn't terribly more expensive than a sensible 4-5 seat hatchback or sedan, and it was almost always cheaper than an SUV (and generally got better mileage too).
The large family thing, at least in the numbers of comments we hear about it, is generally a myth, by the way. I sanity checked my gut reaction by checking the census figures... the median household in 2000 was only 2.59 people. So as I thought, it's a relatively small number of households that actually need something bigger than a normal car. People who have three children all in child seat age at the same time won't fit in a sedan, true. But we're already getting into outlier territory there.
It's certainly not enough to justify what I actually see in real life, which seems to be 30% SUVs - and usually with zero or one passenger. I used to see station wagons and minivans full of people and cargo in the 90s and still do occasionally, but it's very very rarely that I see an SUV with people or cargo in the back.
Niche markets like "Europe". It's only now with semi-automatic gearboxes that non-manuals are becoming slightly more common.
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
Well, somehow in Europe mass transportation managed to survive. And we have suburbs too.
Most American cities are young. Much younger than the Erie Canal or the B&O Railroad. The compression of Manhattan was always the exception. Most looked out on vast expanses of open land.
The distance between New York and Chicago is 712 miles, 1145 km.
Chicago to New Orleans, 832 miles, 1340 km. Chicago to Denver 916 miles, 1474 km. Chicago to San Francisco, 1852 miles, 2981 km.
The American city was always in some sense a tight little island. Not everyone likes living on an island.
The Great Western Railway/British Railways ordered and operated a Brown Boveri turbine-electric locomotive, together with a similar machine using different technology built by Metropolitan Vickers between 1949 and 1960. They weren't a particular success, being heavy on fuel and initially unreliable.
I thought we were talking about commuting.
You mean like the new Jaguar C-X75 concept car unveiled at the Paris auto show this year? Too bad the "concept" couldn't get built earlier, when it would have still been "new". And Jaguar has no plans at this time to actually build a car like this. Good Heavens! You want them to anger their back room business parters?
When you want something built, come see me. If you want correct grammar and spelling, get a F*ing liberal arts student.
Wiki link
*** Don't be dull.***
The Chrysler fleet was very cool, and sadly most had to be destroyed after their field test. But they were built almost 10 years after GM's research led to the three Firebird showcars, which were turbine-based rolling technology testbeds. The first basically a car wrapped around an engine, then a family sedan, and finally an ultra-high-tech showcase. See www.conklinsystems.com/firebird/
Actually GM turbine work went as far back as the 30s, and they built a turbine bus and a turbine truck as well.
There have been a myriad of amazingly well thought out zeppelin ideas that have never been implemented or tested. It seems like the corporate control of several industries has limited human technological development for over a century!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Both minivans and SUVs were developed to get around the CAFE standards because there was a demand for vehicles that if they were under the CAFE standards would have made it impossible for the auto manufacturers to meet those standards
That "impossible" is not an engineering impossible, but rather a political / can't-be-bothered type of impossible.
Elsewhere in the world where CAFE-type standards were set a lot higher than the US and without the big loophole (eg. Europe, Japan) there doesn't seem to be any problem satisfying the demand for family vehicles - and median household sizes are pretty similar in EU and US (around 2.5), so family car demand will be also. I have a large 7-seater (7 adult seats not 5+2kid-sized) that you'd probably call "station wagon" or maybe "minivan". It does 50mpg, fully loaded - that's over 40mpg in US gallons.
Since that would be the large end of the station-wagons, and CAFE is average across the smaller more efficient cars as well, and CAFE standard was 27.5mpg (without using the light-truck loophole), what on earth was the problem ?
It sure wasn't the US companies being backwards in engineering knowledge - that car of mine is a Ford, and right now I could go out here and buy a Ford with better mpg & CO2 than a Prius. Not in America though, oh no, these cars are strictly not-for-US-market.
So why does Ford continue to sell the US market inefficient rebadged 1970s stuff ? Because they can, because low US CAFE targets allow them to, and because it makes more profit without needing to invest any money in modernising their US factories or technology.
Nothing to do with "impossible" and everything to do with "why bother when we can make more money using a loophole to sell old cheap inefficient stuff".
Unrealistic? What exactly does that word mean? All of the car manufacturers managed to meet the fuel efficiency goals: all of them. And, it turns out, it wasn't even really very hard. The pollution goals as well.
But they managed to meet those goals by using gasoline. Diesel makers had a much harder time satisfying pollution regulations. In Europe, pollution regulations were less challenging than in the US which is one reason why you see more diesels in Europe.
Secondly, fuel efficiency goals are much less important for a car that can run on many different liquid fuels including renewable liquid fuels. A car that can burn bio-diesel, alcohol from fermentation, and animal fat, shouldn't be prohibited from being sold simply because someone might burn gasoline at 17 mpg. If a turbine-engined car is unable to meet the government's 30+ mpg ecnomy regulation, should it be prohibited if it can burn renewable fuels?
Third, why must strict pollution regulations apply absolutely everywhere? These turbine-engine cars would have been great for rural people capable of making their own fuel. And the relative lack of people means less pollution overall. A small town might be perfectly capable of tolerating a small amount of nitrogen oxide pollution. Sure, in a city like LA NOx pollution is a problem. But plenty of us don't live in LA.
from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Calorie
The large calorie, kilogram calorie or food calorie (symbol: Cal)[2] approximates the energy needed to increase the temperature of 1 kilogram of water by 1 C. This is exactly 1000 small calories or about 4.2 kilojoules.
Tim S.
Forget about those inefficient jet-turbine engines -- this is the future of jet-powered vehicles!
Jet powered vehicle
It can but the real limit to efficiency on small gas turbines is the gap between the the turbine blades and the housing. The smaller the better but it is a ratio between the turbine size to the gap which really counts. So on say a big airliner where the blades may be say two feet across "I am talking about the actual compressor and turbines and not the main fan" You could will see very tiny gaps. Now try and scale down to a turbine of only 2" across and you can see the problems.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Sounds like LA in the 60s. The smog would on some warm days look like thick fog, except the temperatures would be warm.
In any case, though, this is just the Wall Street Journal's sliding in a political opinion in the guise of a fact. The cars were made in 1962, and the article states "Most of the cars—46 of them—were destroyed in 1967." I don't think you can blame the OPEC Oil embargo of 1973 for the failure of the design six years previously. Perhaps the WSJ should have paid attention to this sentence: "Yes, turbine engines were expensive to mass produce."
Glad you caught this; it was the first thing I thought of when reading the summary. It's why I despise reading about automobiles on Slashdot: the level of ignorance is astounding. The same geeks who think nothing of ridiculing the average person who can't tell the difference between a Banana PCjr and a Banana PCjr with tint control think nothing of posting the most ill-informed commentary on cars.
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
A family with three or more children will need to take two vehicles to go on a family vacation if they cannot afford a station wagon/SUV/minivan. That is in no way more efficient than them using a station wagon/SUV/minivan. It is probably significantly less efficient.
What fraction of families in the United States have three or more children? The census data (see Table HH-4) say that in 2009 the average number of people per household was just 2.56. A shade under 10 percent of households contain five or more people (and not all of those will be two parents and their three kids), only about 3.5 percent clock in with six or more people.
Even then -- how often does the two- and three-child family need a large vehicle to move their cargo for a vacation? The family can use a smaller, less-expensive, more-efficient vehicle for their day-to-day lives, and rent a minivan or trailer for a week or two when they need the extra capacity.
This is actually something more of us should be doing right now. Forget saving the planet, for a moment -- we'd all save hundreds or thousands of real dollars buying and operating smaller vehicles and renting the extra capacity on an as-needed basis.
~Idarubicin
I think people would get over that. Many high-end (piston engine) cars now automatically turn the engine off if it idles for more than a few seconds - it's quite suprising the first time the starter motor engages when you go to pull away at a stop light.
Every year in Ypsilanti Michigan they hold an "Orphan Car show" where the entry rules stipulate that your car must come from a manufacturer that is no longer in business (and must be a certain age, sorry Saturn owners. I think the cutoff is 50 years). The Chrysler museum also brings an item of interest from their collection. (Two years ago it was a Chrysler-built 140db Air Raid siren powered by a 426 Hemi.)
Several years ago they brought their *running* Turbine, and it drove through in the parade. Very. Effing. Cool.
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
Preventing manufacturers from building the sorts of vehicles that people want to buy at a price that they can afford is a recipe for political suicide and both parties know this. The best that can be done is some reasonable regulation. However, if these regulations prevent the average American family of four from buying a family hauler at a reasonable price, there will be hell to pay for those politicians who are seen as being responsible. If CAFE resulted in the SUV and the minivan then perhaps it would have been better for the regulators to concentrate more on cutting tailpipe emissions and oil and gas subsidies, thereby allowing the true price to be communicated to the market, instead of attempting to regulate mileage by "class" of vehicle while all of the other market distorting policies and taxes where still in place.
The vette also has a ridiculously tall top gear, which at 60 mph is ticking the engine over just a few hundred rpm over idle.
Helps fuel efficiency at highway speeds immensely, given the low cD of the vette.
Both minivans and SUVs were developed to get around the CAFE standards because there was a demand for vehicles that if they were under the CAFE standards would have made it impossible for the auto manufacturers to meet those standards.
That may be true, but that is not the whole truth. Another reason minivans were developed and sold well is that they were more appealing, easier to drive, and more efficient than the full-size vans that had already been around for quite some time. The Dodge Caravan, one of the first, was also shorter, lighter, and more efficient than station wagons of the time, plus its cargo and passenger space was more versatile. Ever try loading a sheet of drywall into a station wagon? It doesn't work.
Yes, automakers probably skirted regulations to produce and price their SUVs low, but you can't deny that people love them. The continually strong sales of vehicles like the Chevrolet Tahoe (huge, gas guzzler) over the years, Jeep becoming a "lifestyle" brand, and a huge influx of more fuel efficient SUVs from Japan and Korea, all serve to indicate that Americans simply love their SUVs, which is not even to mention pickups. The SUV craze may not be what it was in the mid-90s, but look around inthe USA and you still seem them everywhere. You can't blame this all on manufacturers, especially since gas prices have gone up and we've moaned so much about it. Even our worst SUVs today are not as bad as the V-8 powered Chevy Belair and Impala, a GTO, or even my mom's old Dart or my Dad's Duster.
For me personally, the answer is not ditching my big, heavy, trusty Isuzu Trooper, but adding a tiny car to justify driving it part time. A Honda CR-Z hybrid will probably be the next addition to my garage, to be used for highway trips and some commuting when there is no snow. The Trooper will still see the road when I have passengers or loads to haul or tow, when the snow falls (and falls and falls), and when I just feel like riding in big American-style comfort. I'm even contemplating picking up another Isuzu, a nice older Rodeo for sale in town, and dedicating one of the two to off-road use. Americans like trucks and SUVs, and just love cars in general. They are much more than transportation to us.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
In the 60s the US Army fitted a Williams gas turbine to an M115 'Mutt' jeep. The engine developed 75 HP vs the standard engine's 71. It could run on a variety of fuels and strt well at low temperatures, and according the reference I have (Crismon's Wheeled Vehicles) it was quite a performer.
They also did it by greatly reducing the power available from a car engine. 300 HP car engines were commonplace in the 1960s (although the numbers were somewhat exaggerated). Only in the last 15 years has technology improved enough to get good pollution, economy, and power all at the same time. As example of what was going on in the middle of that era, a 1984 Corvette had only 180 HP and struggled to meet emissions requirements.
The work to meet pollution and economy restrictions imposed by the gov't has been long, difficult, and expensive.
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Australian station wagons, many built by a branch of GM, had no problems at all meeting those standards. The US car industry was virtually stuck at the tail end of the 1950s doing little but blindly hoping that the government was going to protect them from being wiped out by Japanese imports. A bit of redesign or even contructing designs developed by overseas subsiduries was seen as too much hard work, and any management failures could simply be blamed on unions.
I am not blaming the rise of SUVs on the car manufacturers. I am blaming the rise of SUVs on the CAFE standards. There was a market for vehicles that the auto manufacturers could not sell under the CAFE standards. People who desired/needed those vehicles looked around and found a loophole vehicle, the SUV.
Those who believe in central planning thought they could make better decisions than the market. They were wrong.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Do those Australian station wagons (from the late 70s and early 80s) also meet U.S. safety and emissions standards from that same time period?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
You're a FUCKING IDIOT who doesn't KNOW WHAT HE IS TALKING ABOUT. Despite that you might actually be making SENSE, i'm going to use RANDOM CAPITALIZATION and PURE BULLSHIT and my ASSHOLE ATTITUDE to pretend that I know MORE THAN YOU.
APK
Yes
So, what is the common thread between the M1 and this car? That's right... MOPAR! I wonder how much of the research they put into this engine fed into the M1's development.
I now know which of Jay Leno's cars I want to ride in if ever given an opportunity to pick.
Save Maine's economy: write stuff down. All comments are exclusively my own, not my employer.
BTW, you were even more rude in correcting him - it wasn't necessary to say "...fucking stupid".
www.eFax.com are spammers
But they managed to meet those [pollution] goals by using gasoline. Diesel makers had a much harder time satisfying pollution regulations.
Yeah, 1960s-era diesel engines really were dirty. You didn't ever want to stand downwind of one, unless you didn't mind being covered in soot.
These turbine-engine cars would have been great for rural people capable of making their own fuel.
No, as it turns out, in the real world, people who make their own fuel really really want a vehicle with high mileage, not low.
Counting for time, effort, equipment, and such, fuel you make yourself in small batches is actually vastly more expensive than fuel that gets made in industrial quantities in refineries.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The streetcar lines and suburban electric rail - "light rail lines" - were in deep financial trouble before World War I.
And yet their use might have increased into broad profitability if not for the auto companies buying up and shutting down the profitable public transportation systems that linked these other systems together and made their use feasible.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The Chrysler pavilion at the New York Worlds Fair featured several of these and fairgoers could ride in one for several short laps around the exhibit -- about a minute as I recall. The cars were virtually silent and very very smooth. And then there was Andy Granatelli's STP turbine car that ran in the Indianapolis 500 -- never finished but was successful enough that the race committee modified the rules just enough to ban them without actually banning them.
"I want to know that if I get in an accident with another vehicle - I WIN". That pretty much sums up the arrogance and self serving attitudes of most big SUV owners. People don't buy Humvees so they can tool around at the speed limit - I've been forced off the road twice by rabid Humvee drivers. I'm sure they had a good reason to be driving 40 miles an hour over the speed limit.
You're comment about apparent liberals making CAFE standards that cause auto makers to make big SUV's is so amazingly specious that it is the functional equivalent of saying that the war on drugs causes people to use drugs. And before you go saying about lives lost in drugs vs SUVs, look at what they had to do to the Excursion to keep it from crushing cars underneath it.
Why is this even on SlashDot?... Why is this even on Slashdot?...Why is this even on Slashdot?
Wasn't this the plot of the Harrold Robbins book The Betsy (1978)?
Yeah the WSJ article is one giant fail.
The reporter does even worse research than Glenn Beck.
TODAY'S EPA standards are cleaner than ambient air, but they weren't back in 1975. The standards were about 100 times dirtier than today's LEV-II cars.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
I think it may be because piston engines go "ch-ch-ch-frum" and turbines (usually) go "whoooooooOOOOOOOaaaaaaAAAAAAeeeeeeeeEEEEEEEEE..."
Simple answer: Americans wants their cars to do all of the above and also be powerful. That one requirement blows the whole project to smithereens.
Richmond, Va had The first successful electric trolley line in the US. It began service in 1880 and was dismantled in 1949. Here are some photos and articles.
I wish we still had it vs the sprawl downtown Richmond has become.
Why? Particulates, including, NOx emission, regarding which the US has higher standards. However, Bluetec and similar technologies may pave the way to more diesel in America.
-l
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@ the 1964 ny world's fair...cool car, quite quiet & smooth;-)
Rest of the world says: been there done that.
e.g. 4.2L V8, 350hp, 0-60 in under 6s, top speed hitting the limiter at 155, all wheel drive ... and >30 mpg (US) - ie. meeting CAFE without needing to pretend to be a truck.
What more do you need ? Of course, our cars go round corners properly as well, but you don't need that in the US :-)
I have driven US cars, in the US, and personally I found them pretty uninspiring in terms of performance. If there was anything "powerful" under the hood, it was crippled by the rest of it, particularly the gearboxes.
I was thinking of >45mpg that many Europeans have access to.
Subj.
4.2 liter V8, all wheel drive, and > 30 mpg US? Outside of the fuel economy that sounds like an Audi, but no Audi sold in the US with a V8 engine gets fuel economy that good. And what true 7-seater do you have that does better than 40 mpg? The largest non-commercial passenger vehicles from Europe sold in the US would be the Mercedes R-class and Audi Q7, and even with little diesel 6-cylinder engines their fuel economy ratings are 18/24 and 17/25, respectively - and their third row seats aren't that comfortable. Contrast them to a Ford Flex - more room in all three rows, mileage 17/24 on gasoline, and half the price. Or even better, a Toyota Sienna or Honda Odyssey - gobs more room, mileage 18/24 or 18/27 on gasoline, and half the price. The Flex, Sienna, or Odyssey are not as classy as their upper crust competition and do not drive as well, but for more space and keeping $30,000 in my pocket, I know what I would choose every time.
I don't see how desire to survive an auto accident is morally repugnant. The attitude, "I drive a big SUV so I can crush other motorists for fun" is morally repugnant. The attitude, "I drive a big SUV so I can send text messages and watch movies on my laptop while I drive, under the assumption that anything I hit by accident will not cause me injury" is morally repugnant. Desire for survival is simply normal.
And CAFE did push the US automotive market towards large SUVs. Compared to a Chevy Tahoe (or Nissan Armada, or Ford Expedition, or Toyota Sequoia, or Mercedes GL450), a large station wagon with 7-passenger seating and a powerful engine is more spacious, handles better because of the lower center of gravity, is easier to enter and exit, burns less fuel, is less prone to a rollover in collision, and is faster. But CAFE made it so that producing a station wagon that meets those requirements was very expensive for the automakers, while producing the SUVs was not.
However, that doesn't mean CAFE is inherently broken, just that the specific implementation was flawed and needs correction. In America, conservative = "all government intervention is inherently broken"; liberal = "some specific government interventions are broken". (I like my police, courts, FDA, FCC, fire department, EPA, FBI, Navy, Air Force, Army, Marines, Dept of Treasury, and teachers just fine... but somehow many Americans think that anything the government does is fucked up.)
Audi A8 4.2 TDI. 37.2 combined mpg, UK (>30 uS). [ No, I don't have one of those - it's just an example ]
My 7 seater is a Ford Galaxy, the seats are all full sized (you can swap seats in row 2 &3). New model of that is 49.6 combined mpg, UK. I have an older one which is closer to VW Sharan (same platform) if you want to lookup new model specs (current model 50+ mpg, UK). These cars are renouned for getting good real-world mpg - you can get the theoretical numbers without fancy hypermiling (in fact the passenger seat tends to regard my driving as "aggressive" :-) ).
http://www.ford.co.uk/Cars/Galaxy/FuelEconomyAndCO2Emissions
http://www.volkswagen.co.uk/#/new/sharan-nf/which-model/engines/fuel-consumption
http://www.audi.co.uk/new-cars/a8/a8/specifications.html
Of course, getting run over by an 8 wheeler or a tank will kill you in your International SUV. So eventually we're all running around in concrete bunkers with wheels.
Much better is safety built into the car or truck. Airbags are an example.One of my car's has a gazillion of them, making a cocoon if the thing is run into. Much better to have safety mechanisms that don't kill people as one of the intentional side effects.
Why is this even on SlashDot?... Why is this even on Slashdot?...Why is this even on Slashdot?
Sadly, the sticker price of an Audi A8 4.2 TDI will buy you a colossal SUV and enough fuel that you have to drive 300,000 miles before the A8 is the cheaper option. That's not a useful sales pitch for most Americans.
http://www.ford.co.uk/Cars/Galaxy/SafetyandSecurity - the descriptive text says two rows of seats are covered by side curtain airbags. Since I don't consider the two children I seat in the third row of my present vehicles to be expendable, that eliminates the Galaxy from hypothetical consideration. (In the US market it rules out the Subaru Tribeca and Kia Sorento, among other vehicles.) Otherwise it's an impressive vehicle.
I think this is a difficult area to debate in moral terms because buying better locks for your house doors or a higher model fire extinguisher or a fancier security system for your home does not increase the risk that you kill your neighbor. That makes it difficult to compare car shopping to other forms of personal protection.
But my vehicles routinely transport my four children around, and if my driveway and my budget had room for a school bus, that's what I would use to transport them. I am sympathetic to people who can't afford to participate in this constant escalation of vehicle sizes, and I am also sympathetic to environmental concerns and the desire for independence from oil imports. But I am not willing to take extra risks with my children. We drive two relative giants: Honda Odyssey (aced all crash tests save one in use at the time of its manufacture) and a Ford Flex (aces all current crash tests).
Smaller vehicles like the Mazda5 and Kia Rondo were ruled out because of only average crash test scores, and vehicles like the Kia Sorento, Subaru Tribeca, or Toyota Rav4 were ruled out because they have no side curtain airbag coverage for the third row seats. And many smaller vehicles have no space behind the third row seat, which means a relatively mild rear impact can affect third row occupants. I've seen vehicles with their last row of seats totally destroyed, I refuse to seat my kids in anything with less than a foot of crumple space - that's far from ironclad protection, but at least it's something.
Before I had a family, I didn't care if I commuted on a scooter.
The same might be said of the parents that buy that International SUV? Why didn't you buy one of those? Don't you love your children enough? That's just playing devil's advocate - I do not equate car size to love.
How does one raise their children and how does that equate out to the parents responsibility?? My son played Ice Hockey all through school. I can tell you from painful experience of my own that it is some times a painful experience. He was lucky and never got anything major other than bumps or bruises. In my own case, I've had a broken ankle, torn ankle ligaments, lower back injury Torn ACL and meniscus, and a trigger finger injury from slashing. So I'm well aware of the injuries that can happen,
So where do we draw the risk line? Am I a bad parent for allowing my child to play a violent sport? (that just happens to be about as much fun as you can legally have) BUt now he's grown up, and knows a lot about teamwork, physical fitness, and discipline
I can tell you that he or myself is a lot more likely to become injured in the ice than in a car. There are some of us, myself included who think that a lot of people look at that big vehicle as a measurement indicator of caring for our children. To the point of neuroses. Unfortunately they do not care at all about killing the children of the family they run over.
And the safest mode of all is to not allow children in cars at all. Keep 'em at home in their rooms...
Why is this even on SlashDot?... Why is this even on Slashdot?...Why is this even on Slashdot?
Risk vs. reward is crucial. My sons are in wrestling. Staying at home all day isn't much of a life.
Your son is more likely to get injured on the ice than in a car, but dramatically more likely to get killed in a car than on the ice.