This, gentle readers, was my very first post at the old Car Lust, way back on August 12, 2008. Not sure why I picked this one, but I vaguely recall that I’d seen something on TV about it and thought “Well, that’s certainly Lustable”. In a sense, a good chunk of my posts thereafter used this as something of a baseline as how one might examine certain ‘failed’ cars. I’ll have some thoughts along these lines at the end; in the meantime, I’ve done a bit of editing but this is substantially the same post.
As odd as it may sound, the Chrysler Turbine was not just a concept car but a limited-production model; fifty were actually produced and placed with Chrysler customers for real-world testing. Consequently, this was closer to actual production than your average concept car.The idea of using a turbine engine in automobiles has been around for a while and the concept continues to be batted around and appears every few years in popular technology magazines. A turbine engine works by first compressing air thereby heating it up either directly, or indirectly by burning fuel, and using the expanding air in a turbine which results in work which is used to both further compress incoming air and also provide either rotational energy or thrust, depending on the application. Regular aircraft engines are too large and emit too much heat to simply be placed in a car, so Chrysler’s research focused on reducing the size of the engine and developing a regenerator to recycle hot exhaust gas back into the combustion chamber, thus increasing gas mileage and reducing the output temperature of the exhaust gases.
In fact, turbine engines have several advantages over internal combustion engines: They have far fewer moving parts which reduces maintenance and increases use-life; they can operate on a wide variety of fuels (including, legend has it, tequila); have much less vibration; cold-starts are not an issue; and are much more compact, light-weight, and efficient. Not to mention they produce massive amounts of torque for their size. Disadvantages? We’ll get to those.
Chrysler had some experience with turbine engines due to some work done for the U.S. Navy on aircraft engines during the late 1940s, and the company continued working on an automobile version throughout the 1950s. After experimenting with several generations of engine designs and installing them in various Chrysler cars and trucks – including doing some coast-to-coast trips to test reliability and performance – in 1962 Chrysler announced that it would produce 50-75 turbine-engined cars for consumer testing. The first was delivered in October of 1963. Each user was to drive the car normally for three months, after which the car was sent to another user for 3 months for a total of 203 individual tests.
In all, 50 were produced, plus 3 prototypes. The body of the cars were designed by Chrysler and built by Ghia of Italy. They were 2-door coupes with four bucket seats (front and rear), power everything, and numerous styling cues representing its unique power plant. My favorites are the backup lights styled to look like exhaust nozzles.The engine used in these cars was the fourth generation turbine, the A831. A few numbers:
— 130 bhp at 3,600 rpm
— 425 (!) lb-ft of torque at zero output shaft speed
— Fuel requirements: diesel, jet fuel, vegetable oil, kerosene, the aforementioned tequila, etc.
— Mileage tended to range in the low 20s for gasoline
Here is AllPar.com’s description of how to operate it:
To start it, place the transmission shift lever in the “Idle” location and push down to engage the “Park/Start” position. Turn the ignition key to the right and release it. Starting is automatic. Within a few seconds, the inlet temperature and tachometer gauges on the instrument panel will read about 1700 F and 18,000 rpm, respectively, indicating that the engine is started. Then say “Atomic batteries to power. . . .turbines to speed. . .Ready to move out”.
I may have made that last part up. But how cool would that be every morning?
So why have turbine engines never gone into production? Several reasons. Despite their overall simplicity, they operate at higher temperatures and tighter tolerances than normal engines and thus require specialized manufacturing and materials, not to mention the far more specialized training and experience required to fix them. And, despite their reliability, when they do fail it is often catastrophic. They are also generally noisier than standard engines, requiring fairly sophisticated noise suppression systems. There is also the problem of lag time between pressing the accelerator and the engine spooling up. Perhaps the biggest drawback is in fuel economy. Even though the engine itself is relatively efficient, it operates at a high rpm even while at idle. As a result, turbines will probably remain limited to their role in naval and large vehicle (and aeronautical) applications.
When people first started talking about hybrid cars – at least in the sense of a fuel-powered engine recharging batteries that were then used as the primary propulsive source – I’d thought that a very small turbine engine would be fairly ideal for these sorts of applications: it could run more or less continually at very high efficiency since it’s doing nothing except charging a battery and would take up much less space and weight than an internal combustion engine. Such has not happened, at least not yet, and for probably most of the same reasons listed above. Why bother with an entirely new engine when you can modify a small off-the-shelf one that works almost as well?
The Chrysler Turbine certainly seemed like a great idea at the time, and with the passage of time we wonder why some of these never made it into full production since, to our modern eyes, they’re really, really cool. I think the main problem is that ’cool’ isn’t necessarily ‘functional’ and the vast majority of vehicles are sold to the general public to use in their day-to-day lives. It’s rather similar to natural selection: new features/mutations, for the most part, live or die based on their utility within its contemporary context, not some randomly-assigned Cool Factor. Thus we have millions of entirely functional, plain-Jane 4-door sedans and only a few Turbines sitting in collections.
Photos: The cover photo is from The Chrysler 300 Club. The top photo is from Wikipedia and the engine is from Aeronautic.dk , that has a ton of additional documents on the Turbine. The rear view is from OldCarsCanada. The bottom photo is from Espirituracer.com.
It Rolls. 
