Gas turbine engine concept revived?

Hehe, you remember when Chrysler made one for a sedan in the 60's?
They were torque monsters. 100hp with over 400lbs of torque starting at 0 RPM. All on a gasoline/diesel mixture. No radiator/antfreeze needed, and no warm up times. They were extremely low maintenance as well. Been a while since I seen the documentary. But I think they canned it because of emissions. Maybe today's tech can fix that.

 

You mean one of these.











Only three known to exist. This one does get driven every get once in a while and the man that owns this one has a spare engine. I have recieved two tours of this mans garage.

 

I heard.................. there were some gas turbine powered trucks operating up in the pacific northwest back in the 1970's. It was more of a proof of concept thing rather than an attempt to put large numbers of the noisy beasts in service. Needless to say they didn't work out for a lot of reasons , one being the fuel burn. Another reason, they were setting overhanging trees on fire as the truck passed beneath them while moving at slow speeds.....such as when driving city streets.

Bet you guys didn't know that.

 

That's the one!
Now would I take that car to a mechanic? Or an AnP licensed mechanic? lol

That documentary did mention that.
I bet tailgaters would think twice about tailgating you again!!

 

Believe it or not, a couple of turbine powered trucks parked next to my truck late one night back in the 1970's.

I was never an over the road trucker but I ended up in southern Washington state late one night, the roads were slicker than crap on a rock as I recall so the going was pretty slow. Feeling kind of stressed from the slick roads, I ended up pulling into some raunchy looking old truck stop on the side of the main road in a small town that might have been Umatilla, or something like that.

The truck stop as I think back to that night looked an awful lot like it was last renovated back when Christ died so I didn't stay very long. So anyway, after grabbing a snack and a soda, I started back out to my truck when I noticed a couple of freight haulers had parked next to my truck . They were pulling joints. They were cab overs, no sleepers, and chained up all the way around, obviously because the roads slick. The drivers must have left because nobody was around, the lights were off and the engines weren't running.

What first caught my eye was the size of the exhaust stacks, ( they were bigger around than trash cans ) and as I got closer, the exposed portion of the engine looked nothing at all like any truck engine I had ever seen before.
Oh well is pretty much all the thought I gave to what I'd seen that night seeings how it was so cold out and being in a big hurry, I jumped back into my truck and hit the road.
I never gave any more thought to what I had seen that night till years later when a driver was telling me the story about turbine powered trucks setting overhanging tree branches on fire.

 

The Jaguar CX-75 is the successful marriage of electric and combustable fuel...looking good the whole time.

Since the microturbines can burn any type of fuel (i.e. ethanol, diesel, natural gas, propane, alcohol, etc.), truckers would definitely gain more options to power their business machine. Mechanic service would be tricky to say the least, but a dedicated mechanic certified to service those units would fill that need nicely. Even the electric motors in the CX-75 making total of 780 hp and 1180 ft/lbs of torque would supply ample hauling force to handle the legal OTR load range today.

Any comments or ideas...or news?

 

Jay Leno had a gas turbine motorcycle , they were called Y2K motorcycles, I saw an interview where he said he was sitting at a red light one and the exhaust from the bike melted the front plastic bumper off a car behind him. Here's the video, go to 2:30 it's funny; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BgwmiQr_t8M&feature=youtube_gdata_player

If they could sort out the fuel and heat issues they would be a great idea, one moving part, endless reliability, savage power and torque