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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
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
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
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.
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
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.
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)
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.
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.
...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
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
Not at all. They break the moment they get even a little bump.
Just look at how fragile the engine is in the turbine powered M1 Abrams! It's so fragile, they never ever take it off road or drive across anything other than pristine asphalt.