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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.'"
What happens to the 60,000 rpm turbine (and associated pieces) in an accident?
I don't know... Maybe about the same as what happens to a 100,000 rpm turbocharger?
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
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
"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.
with fuel at less than 3 USD per gallon, why bother?
Just because you've harvested your crop and have a large current supply, doesn't mean you shouldn't plant seeds for next year.
I know it's not a car analogy, but the article is already about cars, so why not a farming analogy?
which is totally what she said
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.
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?
Do the math. Soybeans have a yield of 48 gallons/acre per year.
The US uses 378 million gallons of gasoline per day.
378000000*365/48=2874375000
This means you need 2874.375 million acres if you used soybeans to grow the same amount of fuel. Which is 4.491 million square miles. Well the US has a land area of 3.794 million square miles. So even if you razed the entire US and turned it into a giant soybean field you would not be able to manufacture enough oil.
This is just something I wrote on the back of a napkin. I did not include the higher volumetric energy density of biodiesel as a factor in the calculations. But I did not include the fertilizer manufacturing costs either. Nor did I add the other uses of petroleum to these calculations.
You can use other things than soybean oil. Like peanuts, rapeseed, or jatropha. But you will still need to devote more land area to fuel production than the total land area used for farming in the US to produce this amount of fuel. Crop fuels can only supply a fraction of the total demand.
If you use crop fuels you will need to reduce fuel consumption, reduce the number of cars and miles driven, or use some other measure of rationing the supply. Since we live in a market economy this simply means the price of fuel will rise a lot. The middle class would likely stop being able to own cars.
The end result is that what you will see in the market, if we run out of conventional petroleum, will be oil made from tar sands, natural gas to liquids, coal to liquids, or some other cheap fuel. Not vegetable oil.
Oh and ethanol is even worse.
Well, having had a muffler fall off, I can testify that piston engines are intrinsically pretty loud too.
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.
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.
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
This isn't Twitter. Learn to communicate.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
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 one full of ... ignorance ... is you. The market for oil is integrated worldwide. Supertanker transport is virtually free. Which means that every barrel sold anywhere affects the market on the other side of the world.
As a thought experiment: Imagine the Arab world goes into a huff and decides to stop exporting oil. Europe and Asia therefore have to turn to the next-closest source, Nigeria/Mexico/Venezuela. Since many more people are now bidding for the Nigerian oil, they can afford to put prices up. Since the oil market is so efficient (remember, transport is cheap), prices go up massively even in Podunk, Alaska and Armpit, Texas. The American economy crashes without ever having imported a drop of oil from the Middle East. QED.
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.
I am going to call BS...
http://kn.theiet.org/news/sep10/tata-blaydon-jets.cfm
This car is more fuel efficient, lower emissions, faster and more powerful than anything ever produced for the commercial road.
The trick with jet engines is not to run it lower, but use the power to run an electrical engine that can be ramped up and down.
http://www.bladonjets.com/applications/automotive/
"Requiring no water-cooling system, oil or catalytic converter, it will provide vehicle weight savings of up to 15% – with a consequent reduction in fuel consumption and carbon emissions – compared to a piston engine. Further environmental benefits will be gained from its fast warm up (a few seconds, as opposed to several minutes for a conventional engine), cleaner combustion and lower manufacturing energy requirements. "
"You can't make a race horse of a pig"
"No," said Samuel, "but you can make very fast pig"