when i was a kid in the 60’s and hoping the vietnam war would end before i turned 18
andy granatelli made big medicine in car racing with his turbine cars which way outperformed the ice powered cars of the time. usac outlawed them of course and the whole idea of the turbine car disappeared. i’ve surfed the world wide web and can’t find out why a powerplant competitive at indy 45 years ago isn’t suitable for everyday use. granatelli once said you could burn anything in the car, even french perfume if you could afford it, i wonder if that would be green, but what are the shortcomings of the granatelli powerplant in particular?
I am not sure. Part of the problem was the gearing. Getting the turbine’s high speed down to a drive shaft. The way I remember it was that USAC ddn’t ban them outright, just restricted the intake to where it was non competitive.
About the same time, Chrysler was doing a lot of turbine work, may have even seen production but died for some reason. Efficiency, emissions, cost?
More recently have we had some tubine powered buses?
Ballpark it goes like this:
Turbines are super-efficient … when operated at near full power. They’re stupid inefficient when operated at less than about 3/4ths power.
A race car or an airplane operates at near full power when cruising. And Indy cars in those days had no limits on fuel consumption.
Conversely, a passenger car operates about about 15-20% power when cruising. We could build a turbine-powered car which was efficient in cruise. It’d just have so little horsepower & hence acceleration that it’d make a Prius look like a dragster.
Would you buy a car which does zero-to-60 in 2 minutes but gets 70 mpg? I didn’t think so. Me neither.
Turbines also do not change RPM as quickly and easily as a piston engine does. It’ll take your turbine a lot longer to get to full power when you press on the accelerator after stopping. This is not a problem for an Indy car, but a killer for anyone in stop and go traffic.
A turbine might make sense for a hybrid car however, if the turbine only comes on periodically at full power to keep the battery charged.
I think the waste heat from the exhaust tended to do things like set the asphalt on fire at stoplights until they fixed that. There’s a Chrysler Turbine car at the Petersen Auto Museum in L.A but I don’t think it runs. Too bad they killed it. As i remember they got them pretty well sorted and they never broke down.
One of the first (If not the first) hybrid car built by a car maker was the Volvo Environmental Concept Car of 1992. It used a gas turbine which powered a high speed generator which with the batteries powered the car. The turbine was powered by diesel fuel.
I was at the 1968 time trial with the three Lotus STP turbine cars driven by Joe Leonard (pole poision), Graham Hill and Art Pollard. The year before Parnelli Jones drove the first gas turbine car at Indy that was sponsored by Andy Granatelli and his STP corporation.
In '67 the car was clearly the superior car but a $6 part failed late in the race and cost them the win. That scared the crap of out the Indy racing traditionalist. Shortly after, they came up with rules that limited the intake of gas turbine cars. In '68 Granatelli and STP came back with radically different cars with chassis design by Lotus that complied with the new rules and again, it was obvious that they were superior to the traditional piston engine cars. Again, simple mechanical failures prevented the turbine cars from winning but it was obvious that if the rules weren’t changed the turbine cars would become the standard of Indy racing.
The problem? The turbine cars were almost silent. They whooshed around the track, they didn’t roar around the track. The powers that be saw that as a threat to the product they were marketing. The effectively outlawed the turbines. The scandal was that historically a new technology would be allowed to compete for three years before it was regulated. In the case of the turbines they were almost immediately restricted and outlawed.
Therefore, the turbine racing cars died. Not that they weren’t better but that they weren’t what the promoters of racing wanted.
As to everyday use . . . heat is a problem. Maybe turbines, with current technology could somehow be adapted for common use but it is not likely. If you are running a car company you are probably going to put your R&D into electric cars and alternative fuels. Those hold more promise than turbines. Still, if the world was fair and perfect and what the racing bodies want you to think they are, probably most of the race cars would have turbines and you could listen to your iPod while you were watching a race. Would you bother? That’s their concern.