Hemmings Motor News Blog Blog

Hemmings Motor News Blog

Hemmings Motor News has been around since 1954. We're proud of our heritage, but we're also more than the Hemmings full of classifieds that your father subscribed to. Aside from new editorial content every month in Hemmings, we have three monthly magazines: Hemmings Muscle Machines, Hemmings Classic Car and Hemmings Sports and Exotic Car.

While our editors traverse the country to find the best content for those magazines, we find other oddities related to the old-car hobby that we really had no place for - until now. With this blog, we're giving you a behind-the-scenes look at what we see and what we do during the course of putting out some of the finest automotive magazines you'll ever read.

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Chrysler's Turbine Car

Posted October 12, 2010 10:39 AM by dstrohl

"An automobile gas turbine engine – to be functional – had to be made from low-cost readily available materials, by mass production techniques. It had to be light in weight, compact. It had to have a cool exhaust, a low noise level, prompt response at all speeds. It had to provide 'engine braking', have low fuel consumption. It had to compete with a piston engine that had been refined to its present high efficiency over a 75-year period.:

Barry Wolk recently pointed me in the direction of the Art and Colour blog, and while only a portion of it relates to old cars, that portion includes a link to a brochure for Chrysler's Turbine car - the source of the information above. During the 1960s, some 50 of these Chrysler turbine cars were loaned out to Americans motorists.

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#1

Re: Chrysler's Turbine Car

10/12/2010 10:45 AM

From this page of the brochure - "It operates on a wide variety of fuels, including white gas, diesel oil, kerosene, JP-4 aircraft turbine engine fuel, or any mixture of them." Ethanol and biodiesel, too?

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#2
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Re: Chrysler's Turbine Car

10/13/2010 12:08 AM

Back when I was in high school, a guy I worked with (he was a retired Chrysler employee) actually had one of these. A fantastic automobile- but the exhaust was NOT cool. I always wondered why the concept just sort of disappeared...

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#3
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Re: Chrysler's Turbine Car

10/13/2010 1:21 AM

The problem was accelerator lag- much like turbo lag in some cars today- although much of that has been engineered out.

When the driver "punched it", it took a few seconds for the turbine to wind up enough (even with an automatic transmission) to start pushing you back in your seat. Keep in mind that- at the same time- Chrysler had a 426 Cu In Hemi that could almost instantly put over 400 HP (and about 450 Lb-Ft of torque) to the rear wheels. If they had redesigned the turbine to run at about twice the speed (like the modern turbocharger manufacturers do)- with appropriate gearing for solid torque transfer- we would have seen A LOT MORE of them going into production.

That same period also had the STP turbine Indy racer that nearly won the race in its debut outing (a $4.58 bearing took it out). However, that car IDLED at over 90 MPH and the nature of the race was that rapid dead-start acceleration was virtually never required. It was SO overpowering that the response was to restrict its intake enough to make it a great pace car.

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