- Lehto, Steve.
Chrysler's Turbine Car.
Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2010.
ISBN 978-1-56976-549-4.
-
There were few things so emblematic of the early 1960s as the jet
airliner. Indeed, the period was often referred to contemporarily
as the “jet age”, and products from breakfast cereal
to floor wax were positioned as modern wonders of that age. Anybody
who had experienced travel in a piston powered airliner and then took
their first flight in a jet felt that they had stepped into the
future: gone was the noise, rattling, and shaking from the
cantankerous and unreliable engines that would knock the fillings
loose in your teeth, replaced by a smooth whoosh which
(although, in the early jets, deafening to onlookers outside), allowed
carrying on a normal conversation inside the cabin. Further,
notwithstanding some tragic accidents in the early days as pilots
became accustomed to the characteristics of the new engines and
airframes, it soon became apparent that these new airliners were
a great deal safer and more reliable than their predecessors: they
crashed a lot less frequently, and flights delayed and cancelled due
to mechanical problems became the rare exception rather than something
air travellers put up with only because the alternative was so much
worse.
So, if the jet age had arrived, and jet power had proven itself to be
so superior to the venerable and hideously overcomplicated piston
engine, where were the jet cars? This book tells the long and
tangled story of just how close we came to having turbine powered
automobiles in the 1960s, how a small group of engineers plugging
away at problem after problem over twenty years managed to produce
an automotive powerplant so clearly superior to contemporary piston
engines that almost everybody who drove a vehicle powered by it immediately
fell in love and wished they could have one of their own, and ultimately
how financial problems and ill-considered government meddling destroyed
the opportunity to replace automotive powerplants dependent upon
petroleum-based fuels (which, at the time, contained tetraethyl lead)
with one which would run on any combustible liquid, emit far less pollution
from the tailpipe, run for hundreds of thousands of miles without an oil
change or need for a tune-up, start instantly and reliably regardless of
the ambient temperature, and run so smoothly and quietly that for the first
time passengers were aware of the noise of the tires rolling over the
road.
In 1945, George Huebner, who had worked on turboprop aircraft for
Chrysler during World War II, returned to the civilian automotive
side of the company as war work wound down. A brilliant engineer as
well as a natural-born promoter of all things he believed in, himself
most definitely included, by 1946 he was named Chrysler's chief engineer
and used his position to champion turbine propulsion, which he had already
seen was the future in aviation, for automotive applications. The
challenges were daunting: turboshaft engines (turbines which delivered power
by turning a shaft coupled to the turbine rotor, as used in turboprop
airplanes and helicopters) gulped fuel at a prodigious rate, including
when at “idle”, took a long time to “spool up” to
maximum power, required expensive exotic materials in the high-temperature
section of the engine, and had tight tolerances which required parts to be
made by costly and low production rate
investment casting,
which could not produce parts in the quantity, nor at a cost acceptable
for a mass market automotive powerplant.
Like all of the great engineers, Huebner was simultaneously stubborn and
optimistic: stubborn in his belief that a technology so much simpler and
inherently more thermodynamically efficient must eventually prevail, and
optimistic that with patient engineering, tackling one problem after
another and pursuing multiple solutions in parallel, any challenge could
be overcome. By 1963, coming up on the twentieth year of the effort,
progress had been made on all fronts to the extent that Huebner persuaded
Chrysler management that the time had come to find out whether the driving
public was ready to embrace the jet age in their daily driving. In one of
the greatest public relations stunts of all time, Chrysler ordered 55
radically styled (for the epoch) bodies from the Ghia shop in Italy, and
mated them with turbine drivetrains and chassis in a Michigan factory previously
used to assemble taxicabs. Fifty of these cars (the other five being retained
for testing and promotional purposes) were loaned, at no charge, for periods
of three months each, to a total of 203 drivers and their families. Delivery
of one of these loaners became a media event, and the lucky families instant
celebrities in their communities: a brief trip to the grocery store
would turn into several hours fielding questions about the car and offering
rides around the block to gearheads who pleaded for them.
The turbine engines, as turbine engines are wont to, once the bugs have
been wrung out, performed superbly. Drivers of the loaner cars put more
than a million miles on them with only minor mechanical problems. One
car was rear-ended at a stop light, but you can't blame the engine for
that. (Well, perhaps the guilty party was transfixed by the striking design of
the rear of the car!) Drivers did notice slower acceleration from a
stop due to “turbine lag”—the need for the turbine to
spool up in RPM from idle, and poorer fuel economy in city driving. Fuel
economy on the highway was comparable to contemporary piston engine
cars. What few drivers noticed in the era of four gallons a buck gasoline,
was that the turbine could run on just about any fuel you can imagine:
unleaded gasoline, kerosene, heating oil, ethanol, methanol, aviation
jet fuel, diesel, or any mix thereof. As a stunt, while visiting a peanut
festival in Georgia, a Chrysler Turbine filled up with peanut oil, with
tequila during a tour through Mexico, and with perfume at a French auto
show; in each case the engine ran perfectly on the eccentric fuel
(albeit with a distinctive aroma imparted to the exhaust).
So, here we are all these many years later in the twenty-first
century. Where are our jet cars? That's an interesting
story which illustrates the unintended consequences of well-intended
public policy. Just as the turbine engine was being refined and
perfected as an automotive power plant, the U.S. government started to
obsess about air quality, and decided, in the spirit of the times, to
impose detailed mandates upon manufacturers which constrained the
design of their products. (As opposed, say, to imposing an excise tax
upon vehicles based upon their total emissions and allowing manufacturers
to weigh the trade-offs across their entire product line, or leaving
it to states and municipalities most affected by pollution to enforce their
own standards on vehicles licensed in their jurisdiction.) Since almost
every vehicle on the road was piston engine powered, it was inevitable that
regulators would draft their standards around the characteristics of
that powerplant. In doing so, they neglected to note that the turbine
engine already met all of the most stringent emissions standards
they then envisioned for piston engines (and in addition, ran on unleaded
fuels, completely eliminating the most hazardous emission of piston
engines) with a single exception: oxides of nitrogen (NOx). The latter
was a challenge for turbine engineers, because the continuous combustion
in a turbine provides a longer time for nitrogen to react with oxygen.
Engineers were sure they'd be able to find a way to work around this single
remaining challenge, having already solved all of the emission problems
the piston engine still had to overcome.
But they never got the chance. The government regulations were imposed with
such short times for compliance that automakers were compelled to divert all of
their research, development, and engineering resources to modifying their
existing engines to meet the new standards, which proved to be ever-escalating:
once a standard was met, it was made more stringent with another near-future
deadline. At Chrysler, the smallest of the Big Three, this hit particularly
hard, and the turbine project found its budget and engineering staff cannibalised
to work on making ancient engines run rougher, burn more fuel, perform more
anæmicly, and increase their cost and frequency of maintenance to satisfy
a tailpipe emission standard written into law by commissars in Washington who
probably took the streetcar to work. Then the second part of the double whammy
hit: the oil embargo and the OPEC cartel hike in the price of oil, which led
to federal fuel economy standards, which pulled in the opposite direction from
the emissions standards and consumed all resources which might have been devoted
to breakthroughs in automotive propulsion which would have transcended the
increasingly baroque tweaks to the piston engine. A different time had arrived,
and increasingly people who once eagerly awaited the unveiling of the new models from Detroit
each fall began to listen to their neighbours who'd bought one of those oddly-named
Japanese models and said, “Well, it's tiny and it looks odd, but it
costs a whole lot less, goes almost forever on a gallon of gas,
and it never, ever breaks”. From the standpoint of the mid-1970s,
this began to sound pretty good to a lot of folks, and Detroit, the city and the
industry which built it, began its descent from apogee to the ruin it is
today.
If we could go back and change a few things in history, would we all be
driving turbine cars today? I'm not so sure. At the point the turbine was
undone by ill-advised public policy, one enormous engineering hurdle remained,
and in retrospect it isn't clear that it could have been overcome. All turbine
engines, to the present day, require materials and manufacturing processes which
have never been scaled up to the volumes of passenger car manufacturing. The
pioneers of the automotive turbine were confident that could be done, but
they conceded that it would require at least the investment of building an
entire auto plant from scratch, and that is something that Chrysler could not
remotely fund at the time. It's much like building a new semiconductor fabrication
facility with a new scaling factor, but without the confidence that if it
succeeds a market will be there for its products. At the time the Chrysler
Turbine cars were tested, Huebner estimated their cost of manufacturing at
around US$50,000: roughly half of that the custom-crafted body and the rest the
powertrain—the turbine engines were essentially hand-built. Such has been
the depreciation of the U.S. dollar that this is equivalent to about a third
of a million present-day greenbacks. Then or now, getting this cost down to
something the average car buyer could afford was a formidable challenge, and
it isn't obvious that the problem could have been solved, even without
the resources needed to do so having been expended to comply with
emissions and fuel economy diktats.
Further, turbine engines become less efficient as you scale them
down—in the turbine world, the bigger the better, and they work
best when run at a constant load over a long period of time.
Consequently, turbine power would seem optimal for long-haul trucks,
which require more power than a passenger car, run at near-constant
speed over highways for hours on end, and already run on the diesel
fuel which is ideal for turbines. And yet, despite research and test
turbine vehicles having been built by manufacturers in the U.S.,
Britain, and Sweden, the diesel powerplant remains supreme.
Truckers and trucking companies understand long-term
investment and return, and yet the apparent advantages of the turbine
haven't allowed it to gain a foothold in that market. Perhaps the
turbine passenger car was one of those great ideas for which, in the
final analysis, the numbers just didn't work.
I actually saw one of these cars on the road in 1964, doubtlessly driven
by one the lucky drivers chosen to test it. There was something sweet about
seeing the Jet Car of the Future waiting to enter a congested tunnel
while we blew past it in our family Rambler station wagon, but that's
just cruel. In the final chapter, we get to vicariously accompany the author on
a drive in the Chrysler Turbine owned by Jay Leno, who
contributes the foreword to this book.
Mark Olson's turbinecar.com
has a wealth of information, photographs, and original documents relating
to the Chrysler Turbine Car. The History Channel's documentary,
The Chrysler Turbine, is available
on DVD.
January 2011 