Several cars have been converted to use WW2 Merlin Fighter Plane engines.
The results proved difficult to control on the highway, & hard to maintain.
This, now if you were to modify the car (beyond what’s needed to mount the engine) to be able to successfully accept and utilize all that power, you might have a pretty neat dragster.
Also, it is possible, and has been done in fact, to build a car powered by a scaled down turbine engine.
This reminds me of how before WW2 they initially tried to make “super-fighters” by putting the larger bomber engines into existing fighter aircraft without any regard to modifying the aircraft to better handle them. The end result was aircraft that were incredibly fast going in a straight line but were incredibly hard to maneuver or land.
Huh, never heard about that. I guess your best option in a dog fight would be to run away.
But if you’ve got a fighter that runs away from dogfights, then why do you have a fighter?
It’s sort of like how, when the B2 was introduced, we didn’t actually use them, because they were too expensive, and we didn’t want to risk one getting shot down.
The Ford GAA engine that went into Sherman tanks
can make you Mustang look like a Hot Wheels car.
https://www.google.com/search?q=ford+gaa+mustang&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&client=firefox-b-1
Wait, so this was a rendering? Looks pretty real…
I’ve always fantasized about using the engine from a M88A1 to power acar of my own construction (or at least my specs anyway).
I’d want it to look more like your mustang though.
Turbine engines have been used in tractor pulling for years. Have a look at the beast at the bottom of this article
This is not a good idea because tank engine gives more power but not speed.
A more powerful engine (such as a tank engine) gives you more power; it’s up to the engineer to use appropriate gearing to provide the desired vehicle performance. The M1 Abrams is only good for 45 MPH, but you don’t have to use the same transmission; get some taller gearing, and 1500HP will indeed make you get on down the road, considerably faster than 45MPH.
Bear in mind that the AGT-1500 weighs some 1100 kg and the XM-1100 transmission adds some 2000 kg to that. So any automotive integration is starting at a power to weight ratio that’s not all that unusual.
It’s a test mule, with no actual performance figures. You don’t build a prototype four years before the start of production.
The transmission would be gone; it’s designed for massive torque and low RPM at its output shaft, totally unsuitable for a high-speed car. A transmission designed for high RPM and much lower output torque is going to weigh a lot less than 2000kg.
The “45 mph” is top governed speed.
Even with the governor, we’ve exceeded that. Not by a whole lot, mind you, but yeah, we left it in the rear vision block.
well, OP’s subject and post are rather open ended, but I’m pretty sure he wasn’t thinking of hooking up a 1,500 horsepower engine to a Dodge Neon 3-speed transmission 
And I imagine you’re probably not allowed to say what you can get it up to with the governor disabled. And yes, I know that that’s not safe, and I’d also bet a pretty penny that there’s at least one guy you know who’s done it anyway just to see what he could do at full throttle. I’ve a cousin who has never used any mode of transportation at less than its maximum possible speed, and he’s told us some stories of his time in tanks.
Interceptor. Don’t get into dogfights at all. Zoom in, shoot the bomber formation with your nuclear-warhead guided (or unguided) missile, and zoom away.
In the 50s and 60s, dogfighting was passé to warplanners and weapons designers.
Never done it myself, but conventional wisdom pretty much says that track and/or drive train will crap out before (or, at least, not too long after) you hit Vmax.
The old Rumor Mill (got some salt handy? partake before continued reading) says that during trials, M1s hit 90+ mph.
My personal best was 57 mph (at least according to the MP that pulled us over, though we didn’t actually see the radar gun he clocked us with; it’s not like we were going to contest a ticket* anyway, as it was on Motor Pool Rd.**, which was a 25 mph zone end-to-end, and we blew right by that as soon as we left the motor pool); but we were going downhill (at full throttle, according to my Driver), so it probably doesn’t count.
*I don’t think that Army MPs issue actual “tickets” to soldiers caught speeding in military vehicles; I think the “ticket” somehow gets magically converted into an Official Raft of Shit, gets carried to the top of a Hill, thereby to Roll Down at an ever-increasing rate of speed until it achieves some kind of military “escape velocity/bureaucratic critical momentum,” and lands at the bottom of the Hill (and directly on some unfortunate soul) in a veritable Poop Typhoon.
Yes, the base road that runs behind all of the major unit motor pools is actually called Motor Pool Rd.; the U.S. Army conserves its creative naming energies for things like Strykers and Javelins, and doesn’t waste it on mundane stuff like roads*.
***Which, come to think of it, doesn’t adequately explain the T.O.W. Missile; that must’ve been named on a “Fuck-It-Friday” afternoon.
I bet you let the contractor name that. And charge you plenty for it. And by “you” I mean the program office, not the line beasts shooting the thing after all the money was spent.