What are Car gas turbine engines?

Question

What happened to them???
What is the advantage and disadvantages?
How do they work?

Answer 1

Gas turbine engines run in the 20,000 to 30,000 rpm range. Which is way to high for normal driving. The car would need reduction gears in order to work and that drop efficacy.

Also Turbine engines do not like sitting still for too long and will over heat very fast. On the subject of heat. A turbine engine exhaust gas is very hot, and a lot of the parts in side need to withstand temp up in the 800 degrees to 1000 degrees mark. Which makes for some expensive parts. Off the top of my head the average price of the first turbine wheel can cost up to $12,000 for a smaller engine. That's one part for the price of a regular internal combustion engine.

Car and large truck manufactures did try some experiments in the 50s and 60s but scraped the ideas.

Answer 2

Oshcosh an american truck builder make a io wheeler military truck with a helicopter gas turbine in for the us army what a beastie

Answer 3

Chrysler built a few dozen prototypes back in the mid sixties and ran a consumer test of them but found that most people did not like how they sounded when driving and also had problems with turbo lag for acceleration, high fuel consumption and high exhaust heat. They could run on a variety of fuel sources with no modification between using various fuels and were quite unique but not practical for automotive use at the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Turbine_Car

Answer 4

Have a look at

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_turbine

for an explanation.

The only car I know of that had a gas turbine in was a Rover in 1950

http://news.bbc.co.uk/onthisday/hi/dates/stories/march/8/newsid_2516000/2516271.stm

But I'm sure there have been others.

Answer 5

tried by rover and they went under a bad lag on take off