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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.'"
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.
What happens to the 60,000 rpm turbine (and associated pieces) in an accident? Not good.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Gas turbines with that level of efficiency are built using different construction techniques so they can run at a higher temperature. Since it is for a stationary application you can afford making the turbine very heavy. You can also use more fragile ceramics which do not handle the vibrations of a moving vehicle very well. Then they are cooled using water cooling towers. They are basically using a river as a cooling source.
In a car you cannot use such cooling mechanisms. You basically use air cooling. You cannot make the engine too heavy because you will decrease mileage per gallon.
Try checking out the operational range for vehicles with gas turbines like the M1 and T-80 tanks versus the Leopard 2 and T-84 tanks which use regular diesel engines.
It is not impossible to do a viable turbine car. But it will probably have to be a hybrid in order to reduce idle power fuel consumption, use more advanced lightweight construction materials and techniques.
Trains don't need rapid acceleration, but they do need efficient cruising speeds...
Only works over flat land with no (slow) cities. I have three male generations of railroad employees in my ancestry... I had some pretty interesting experiences when I was younger, most of which, even back then, probably violated dozens of regulations. Trust me, a railroad engineer out on the mainline works the throttle and brakes at least as much as a car driver in roughly the same terrain. Their arms get tired... "Why does the throttle only have 8 stops?" "Well, you're adjusting it constantly anyway, so why put in more stops?"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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...
http://www.northeast.railfan.net/turbines.html
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
You don't seem to have any idea of how much total energy this nation consumes vs. how much is in the food we eat. The US uses somewhere in the neighborhood of 1e20 joules of energy each year. If the average person consumes 2500 Cal per day of food, that's about 1.1e18 J of food energy per year.
We use almost 100 times as much total energy as the amount of energy in the food we currently grow. Even supplying the small fraction of energy that goes into automobile transportation is not going to be possible by increasing production of food crops, especially since irrigation water is already in seriously short supply in many areas.
"Sharks in a school of tuna" is sorta imprecise, could you give us the fuel efficiency in Libraries of Congress?
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
Gas turbines have are over 60% efficient.
As far as I know, efficiencies that high are only possible in a combined cycle application where you also add a huge steam turbine powered by the exhaust heat of the gas turbine. The gas turbine by itself is not as efficient as a good diesel engine, and gas turbine efficiency scales with size. By definition, an automotive turbine is going to be small and inefficient.
Schwarzenegger has an after market conversion hybrid for his Hummer. It uses a jet turbine to fill the battery. I recall reading the article in 2006 or 2007 in MIT Tech Review.
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.)
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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.
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I can confirm this - a "normal" gas turbine is somewhere in the 25% - 30% efficient range (for producing electricity) however when you add a Heat Recovery Steam Generator (HRSG) on the back side, using the hot air from the turbine, the over-all numbers can jump to 80%+. As it is, I think even the new GE turbines which incorporate an intercooler only reach about 40%, and that is really good.
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
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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
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)
Remember, in a thermodynamic cycle, the maximum efficiency you can get is:
eta = 1-Tcold/Thot (in Kelvin)
This formula is all you need to know to debunk stupid claims of efficiency of sellers of snake oil thermal systems. In practise, getting 80% of that is really, really good.
Big turbines are efficient because they run hot, as hot as the materials will allow, in fact [1]. The blades are designed so a cushion of air protects them from the burning gaz. You do not want a turbine running at 2000 C in you car: combusting the passengers would most likely be considered a downside.
[1] Russians used to machine titanium alloy monocristal compressor blocks for the power plants of their Sukhoi aeroplanes. In the west, use of ceramics is favoured.
Did you even bother reading the summary? This thing could run on any flammable liquid (with varying levels of efficiency.) It could have been a strong candidate for reducing oil consumption, not "burning through" it.
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.
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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.
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.
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
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?
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".
Jaguar is building another jet powered car, except this time the jet engine is used to charge a battery that will power an electric motor similar to what the Chevy Volt does. Volvo tried the same thing in the 90s with a jet powered hybrid.
my karma will be here long after I'm gone
If it's anything like this turbine-electric hybrid Hummer, it gets 60 MPG and can go from 0-60 in 5 seconds.
Slashdot's first reaction to VMware
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
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