Just watched this and thoroughly enjoyed it. What an amazing undertaking and incredible they could pull something like this off at the time.

It’s over an hour but I highly recommend it

 

Nice find. I remember the Chrysler Turbine program as a young pre-teen, although I was (then) too young to really understand some of the details. As I understood it, though, two things worked heavily against it.....First, the fact that turbines were precision-made, very expensive to produce, and impractical for high-volume vehicles. Two, they had the same problems that early non-afterburner turbines did in aircraft......poor throttle response at low speeds, long spool-ups required to reach full power, and very high fuel consumption, although some of the high fuel-cost was mitigated by the fact that turbines could run on very cheap, low-quality fuels that would damage a typical gas engine

Unlike today, Chrysler had a well-deserved reputation for engineering and powertrain-durability in those days, although it was not always reflected in good QC on the factory assembly-lines. A number of auto-pundits mentioned the similarity of the Turbine car's rear-end to Ford Thunderbirds of the period.....and I agree. Thunderbirds of the period were well-known for their seductive styling.

 

It was going to tag you in it, you should definitely watch it if you haven’t already

 

No arguments there....which is unusual for you and me LOL. It's a great video.

Can't help but notice it was painted the same color as my Encore GX LOL.

I don't remember anyone mentioning it back then, but, while the rear end and side-profile looked like a Thunderbird, the front end and big round headlights, IMO, was like some years of the AMC Rambler.

I didn't see it mentioned in the video, but, despite the publicity the turbine car got, one significant factor that limited its public appeal was that the fabulously-successful 1964-65 Ford Mustang was introduced at just about the same time...April of 1964, and advertised at a low $2364 (I still remember that MSRP...it was well-publicized). The Mustang was the first pony-car in history, and, at the time, set a new American sales-record, although that record was broken by the 1980 Chevy Citation, which was a brilliant concept but quality-wise a POS, and the Citation and all the X-Bodies were gone by 1985.

 

Yeah I think a foregone conclusion was that they would just always be too expensive to sell to the public.

I was legitimately sad to see them all destroyed!

 

Well, there is some consolation in that today's BEVs offer much of the same drivetrain-smoothness as the turbines did, are notably quieter without the white, don't require any special start-procedures, don't depend (at least directly) on any liquid-fuels, ask only for a plug-in-recharge every few hundred miles or so....and don't cost anywhere near as much to produce, even in inflation-adjusted dollars since 1964.

Agreed.

As for its potential future contribution to the auto industry, though, I personally think the 1948 Tucker Torpedo was a far more important vehicle. About the same number of them were built as the turbine cars (51 instead of 59)....although the Torpedo was not given out to families like the turbine car. And the Torpedo featured a whole slew of new safety-innovations, from stem to stern, while the turbine car was basically just a slick-styled conventional car with a turbine drivetrain. The Torpedo featured a third, swiveling "Cyclops" headlight that moved with the steering wheel (it was blanked out in states that did not allow a third light up front), safety-glass for the windows, pop-out windshield for collisions, seat belts, padded dashboard, disc brakes, a roll-bar integrated into the roof, collapsable steering column for impacts, and a number of other features, although the rear-engine design (as with VW's old air-cooled Beetles and Chevy's later Corvair) could give squirrely handling. Anyhow, the Torpedo's safety features, for a number of reasons, weren't adopted by other manufacturers until decades later, and partially through Ralph Nader's actions. Ford tried offering some of them in the mid-1950s, but the public itself didn't take.

 

Yeah a lot of safety innovations came from the Tucker

 

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I'm getting an error on the video, but will try again later.
Funny thing, we have three of these for sale at my model shop. No takers yet but they get a lot of comments!