Chrysler, you made me cry....

[Whitehouse]

This year marks the 50th birthday of a sensational car that was way ahead of it's time; The Chrysler Turbine. They made 55 examples for evaluation. The concept worked but what did the men on top decide? Crush them!



By some miracle a nine examples escaped the carnage and now there are three in running condition, including the one that Jay Leno owns.

Fast forward four decades.
Chrysler decides to commemorate that very significant car with a "turbonized" version of the 300C....
Come on!! All whisles and bells and no bang?? If you truly would want to commemorate that car you would also invest some genuine turbine power for that car!

Ferrari would look like a bunch of asshats of they build a commemorative version of the famous GTO with Dino power!

This is no way to celebrate a legendary car! First destroy the bulk of them and then piss on their graves with a weak substitude.

Shame on you, Chrysler!


Edit:
A link to an article about the replica car should have been inserted in this message but somehow seemed to have been vanished. This is what I've been talking about.

[p69rrh51]

This year marks the 50th birthday of a sensational car that was way ahead of it's time; The Chrysler Turbine. They made 55 examples for evaluation. The concept worked but what did the men on top decide? Crush them!



By some miracle a nine examples escaped the carnage and now there are three in running condition, including the one that Jay Leno owns.

Fast forward four decades.
Chrysler decides to commemorate that very significant car with a "turbonized" version of the 300C....
Come on!! All whisles and bells and no bang?? If you truly would want to commemorate that car you would also invest some genuine turbine power for that car!

Ferrari would look like a bunch of asshats of they build a commemorative version of the famous GTO with Dino power!

This is no way to celebrate a legendary car! First destroy the bulk of them and then piss on their graves with a weak substitude.

Shame on you, Chrysler!

You are right to cry its a very cool car but in this instance its not Chrysler but Uncle Sam who forced the cars to be destroyed. An image a very brief history on the Turbine from Automobile Quarterly Volume 8 Number 1 published in 1969.

[Whitehouse]

It's not that I'm crying of the loss of the bulk of the bunch of these cars, I cry about the lame attempt by Chrysler to "recreate" a turbine car... only to read that it's powered by a lame V6 piston engine. How hard can it be to obtain a turbine engine these days? Granted, that would not be a Chrysler power source [[unless you can fit a turbine engine from an Abrams M1 tank under the hood) but at least it would be an honest and genuine turbine powered car! That would have been a proper tribute to the legend.



This is just a 300C with a fancy dress!

[JBMcB]

How hard can it be to obtain a turbine engine these days?

The closest thing you could get to "off the shelf" would be a turboshaft engine from a small helicopter, and even then you'd have to extend the wheelbase of a 300 by a few feet to squeeze the thing in there. Then you'd have to deal with emissions standards [[you'd probably fail every emissions test there is.) You can't just bolt a 700HP turboshaft engine onto a regular transmission, so you'll need a whole new drivetrain, and type acceptance for a new drivetrain lasts about six to eight years and can cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ultimately you'd have a long-nosed 300 that would probably cost around a million dollars per car - if you wanted to break even.

But hey, Chrysler could say they are selling a turbine-based car. So there'd be that.

[gnome]

On the old forum there was a guy who either drove them out in Chelsea or had a dad who did. IIRC, the problem with the cars wasn't the going, it was the stopping. Also, they had no low end torque so getting up to speed was tough.

i believe the takeaway was that it was the wrong system at the wrong time for the wrong product.

[jbd441]

IMHO, this is one butt ugly car.

[Pickford-Bentler]

Quote from linked article: " And while it lacks the torque-tastic turbine from the original car that could run on everything from diesel fuel to booze..."

Turbines bring on torque slowly. So I fail to see how they are "torque-tastic". Maybe they mean the fact that once the torque starts up it keeps on going.

Anyhow, a turbine could possibly work well with mild E-motor series hybrid technology. In that type of system, the E-motor would help get the car off of the line till the turbine can kick in.

[Whitehouse]

Quote from linked article: " And while it lacks the torque-tastic turbine from the original car that could run on everything from diesel fuel to booze..."

Turbines bring on torque slowly. So I fail to see how they are "torque-tastic". Maybe they mean the fact that once the torque starts up it keeps on going.

Anyhow, a turbine could possibly work well with mild E-motor series hybrid technology. In that type of system, the E-motor would help get the car off of the line till the turbine can kick in.

From Wikipedia:

The engine had just 1/5th of the moving parts of a traditional piston-based internal combustion engine [[60 rather than 300).The turbine spun on simple sleeve bearings for vibration-free running. Its simplicity offered the potential for long life, and because no combustion contaminants enter engine oil, no oil changes were considered necessary. The 1963 Turbine's engine generated 130 brake horsepower [[97 kW; 132 PS) and an instant 425 pound-feet [[576 N·m) of torque at stall speed, making it good for 0 to 60 mph [[0 to 97 km/h) in 12 seconds at an ambient temperature of 85 °F [[29 °C)—it would sprint quicker if the air was cooler and denser.

Also, it's nice to hear about the car from someone who actually owns one.

[Pickford-Bentler]

"Throttle lag and exhaust gas temperatures at idle plagued early models; Chrysler was able to remedy or mitigate these to some degree. Acceleration lag, however, remained a problem, and fuel consumption was excessive. Acceleration was outstanding provided the turbine was spun up [[by applying power) prior to releasing the brakes. Otherwise it was mediocre. The Turbine Car also featured a fully stainless steel exhaust system, the exits of which were flat in cross section. This was intended to spread the exhaust gases thinly and thus cool them further, in order to allow the vehicle to stand in traffic without risking damage to following traffic. The combustor, or burner, was somewhat primitive by the standards of modern turbojet engines. A single reverse-flow canister featuring a more-or-less standard spark plug for ignition was employed. Had the engine been further developed, annular combustion chambers along with a second power turbine might have improved power and economy even more. The transmission had "idle" instead of "neutral".^[5]m the linked wiki article: " I got this from the link you posted. I should have been more clear. The torque is not instantaneous until the turbine spools up. That said, there is a lag with respect to throttle application by the driver. My solution is to let an E-motor make up for the lag till the turbine spools up. The motor could be geared in parallel with the turbine to allow for regenerative braking. I apologize if this text looks bad. This site does not seem to format well on Windows 8.

[downtown_racine]

As a car nut I have never understood the attraction or cool factor of these cars or any car with a turbine engine short of the jet car flame and noise show at the dragaway.

The Chrysler Turbine is but ugly and a piston engine will whoop a turbine in a car in any case, you wanna go fast you get a V8, been that way for almost 100 years.
I always laugh when I hear people talk about how bad auto technology is because we are still using dead dinosaurs to fuel internal combustion engines "that havent changed hardly at all since inception".

[p69rrh51]

As a car nut I have never understood the attraction or cool factor of these cars or any car with a turbine engine short of the jet car flame and noise show at the dragaway.

The Chrysler Turbine is but ugly and a piston engine will whoop a turbine in a car in any case, you wanna go fast you get a V8, been that way for almost 100 years.
I always laugh when I hear people talk about how bad auto technology is because we are still using dead dinosaurs to fuel internal combustion engines "that havent changed hardly at all since inception".

Actually the V-8 has been around about 105 years. At the time the turbine because of its ability to use different fuels looked like the way to go. My favorite was when they used Chanel No.5 to power the turbine.Technology at the time showed that the turbine was not up to the job. I do not know what the state of turbine technology is today and I have not heard anything about the engine. Maybe someone can enlighten us to current technology.
As for dinosaurs as the saying goes if it aint broke don't fix it!

[Wheels]

Here is some info of the plant on Greenfield where the turbines were built.

http://www.turbinecar.com/greenfield.htm

[detlump]

The turbine car was a great engineering exercise, and also a good PR move. Turbines and jets were still very high tech in popular culture, similar to how stealth was recently - Cadillac art and science design theme, for example. Chrysler could not sell them for liability reasons, plain and simple. A few escaped but like most concept cars, they either end up in a museum or crushed.

[Whitehouse]

Small correction on what Jay Leno mentioned. The Turbine car indeed featured in "The Lively Set". What he said was that the Turbine car was completely rebuild as a streamlined model. It wasn't. It simply was painted white with a blue stripe. You can see the car in the movie trailer for that film, which miraculously is on Youtube.



You can see the Turbine around 1'20".

[Cincinnati_Kid]

Is it just me, or does the Chrysler turbine look like a Thunderbird?