Chrysler's Turbine Car

[thewayne]

In the 60's, Chrysler made a car with a turbine engine. A jet turbine. 60,000 RPM. 5,000 hours life compared to 3,000 for a piston engine. 1,800 degrees F.

And it destroyed almost all of them after an amazingly successful pilot program that ran over a million miles in 50 prototypes.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703369704575462133272933798.html

http://jalopnik.com/5662006/the-rise-and-fall-of-americas-jet+powered-car

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/10/10/17/1213207/The-Rise-and-Fall-of-Americas-Jet-Powered-Car

Pretty cool, I'd love to see one. Apparently Leno has one of the four that wasn't destroyed, I have no idea if the other three still exist. The Jalopnik article has three videos of the car driving. I'd love to know what the interior noise and heat levels were like, air conditioning in cars wasn't too common in those days.

Comments

[silveradept]

Jet-powered cars. That would have been excellent. And had we figured out the problems with them, I'm sure the flying cars of Twenty Minutes Into The Future would have been easy past that.