If you want low part count, Chrysler made turbine powered cars back in the 60s. The engine was small, quiet, and had good power, but it was a gas guzzler and the exhaust would burn people standing too close to the tailpipe, or melt asphalt if you were waiting at a light. Plus, it had crappy torque and lots of throttle lag making it slow off of the line.
Somewhere way in the back of my mind I hope Chrysler decides to go and make a turbine-electric hybrid car, with I guess a lot of free air mixing on the exhaust to cut down the temps. The upfront cost would be high and the fuel consumption might be iffy, but it would be really exciting to see. Plus, the long term maintenance costs could be lowerâin airplanes turboprops have largely displaced reciprocating pistons in everything larger than a Cessna for this reason.
There are also compressed air cars used in India. They donât have good range or anything, but theyâre super cheap and you can direct the air through the passenger compartment after it has done its job turning the wheels to help cool it down. The downside of this scheme is that you only get cool air when youâre moving, but it does mean the air inside the car is potentially much cleaner than the dirty 2-cycle scooter fumes everybody else is breathing.
Anything putting out that much waste heat is a great opportunity for co-generation, thus improving efficiency even further for oneâs hybrid. Iâd love to see someone make a hybrid-tuned turbine generator along those lines.
I remember the inventor telling the press how great it was and that the cool air it produced would combat global warming. Given that compressing the air produces an amount of heat equal to the amount absorbed by expanding it, there is no net cooling effect ⌠so, because that inventor was the technical lead for the project, I wrote him off as an idiot.
I see Tata motors is still developing theirs - not sure if its the same guy I saw in the news:
The old air-cooled veedubs required new points, condenser, plugs, valve adjustment (with new valve cover gaskets), and oil change every 3000 miles (unacceptably high maintenance by present standards); and that didnât stop them from being considered one of the most reliable cars of the era.
The advantage of the old beetle is that it is so simple that anybody can just look at it and figure out what everything is. You donât have to worry about power steering, A/C, the water pump, emissions equipment, etc⌠Also, âmost reliable car of 1966â is damning with faint praise if I ever heard it.
With a rotating block, water cooling (and the use of the coolant for heating) would seem to be impossible. I agree that this is really a radial engine.
In following the links in the wiki article, I eventually landed on Swashplate engines, and found the company named in this very BoingBoing thread down among the implementations.
EDIT: @softdorothy posted a much better link, immediately above this post. His doesnât have the fancy Wikipedia trappings, but the linked site is more detailed by far.
I had a professor who was involved with the Chrysler turbine car. He explained the big problem was the throttle lag. Grandma would hit the gas when the light turns green, and the car would slowly accelerate across the intersection. Sheâd be flooring it, but itâd still just creep along. Then about the time she got through the intersection, it would suddenly spool up to full power, propelling her at terrifying speed down the road
Chrysler didnât want to kill grandma, so it killed the project instead.
Thatâs exactly the sort of thing a Hybrid setup could help with. Also, the horrible fuel consumption at idle problem, although you need a turbine that can be stopped and started regularly. The best approach might be all electric drive and only spool up the turbine to run a generator (bonus: you get to run it at only its optimum speed, saving fuel).
Two years ago, after it didnât fly at Oshkosh, they promised to flog it to Detroit as per https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=7AbwCbBdVPg and I donât recall it getting any traction then. Much rather see a coupled pair of two strokes, where one mixes the fuel and air, compresses it, then sends it to the second where it detonates for the power stroke; far simpler and cleaner.
This reminds of "being up to your butt in alligators and remembering that your intent was to drain the swamp. Here we are being sidetracked with a very interesting engineering discussion and forgetting that we need a solution to oil.
Yes, oil change every 3K was pretty much standard for engines in those days.
The rest, not at all, in my experience.
Maybe you heard this from someone who really loved doing all that, not me; I fixed 'em when they absolutely had to. With time you knewâŚ
