In 1963, an American family could open their garage to the sound of a jet. Chrysler built a fleet of bronze, Italian-bodied coupes powered by gas turbines — genuine cousins of aircraft engines — and lent them, free, to ordinary households across the United States to find out whether the jet age could commute. It remains one of the most audacious consumer trials a carmaker has ever run, and the reasons it failed are more interesting than the whirr.
A turbine has a fraction of the moving parts of a piston engine, never needs a tune-up, and will burn almost any liquid that lights. It also drinks at idle, responds on a delay, and glows at temperatures that make cheap manufacturing nearly impossible. Every turbine car ever built lived and died on that trade.
Why a turbine, and how it works in a car
A gas turbine compresses air, burns fuel in it continuously, and extracts power from the expanding exhaust through spinning turbine wheels — no pistons, no valves, no reciprocating anything. For a car this promised near-vibration-free smoothness, a tiny parts count (Chrysler quoted about a fifth as many moving parts as a V8), cold-morning starts without chokes or stalls, and glorious fuel agnosticism: diesel, kerosene, heating oil, vegetable oil — famously, the president of Mexico ran one on tequila. Chrysler's fourth-generation engine made around 130 horsepower with monstrous torque from rest, and used rotating heat exchangers ("regenerators") to recycle exhaust heat and tame the thirst that sank cruder turbines.
The great public experiment
Chrysler's engineers had run turbines in ordinary-looking cars since the 1950s, including coast-to-coast publicity drives. The 1963 program was different in kind: 55 purpose-built Turbine Cars — bodies hand-built by Ghia in Italy, in a colour literally named "turbine bronze" — of which 50 rotated through a public user program. More than 200 families ultimately ran them as daily transport, over a million collective miles, and their diaries became the dataset: drivers loved the smoothness and reliability, and reported two consistent complaints — throttle lag (a beat of spool-up between pedal and shove) and fuel economy that was tolerable on the highway and dire around town, because a turbine burns significant fuel just idling at traffic lights.
The program's end supplied the legend: with the trial over, Chrysler destroyed most of the fleet — the Ghia bodies had entered the US under import-duty arrangements that made keeping them expensive — and only a handful survive, in museums and two famous private hands (Jay Leno's runs). The crushing footage still circulates as "suppressed invention" fodder; the customs paperwork is the duller truth.
Why turbines never made it
Four walls closed in at once:
- Fuel economy at part load. Turbines are efficient at constant high output — cruise ships, power stations, aircraft — and wasteful in stop-start traffic, which is most driving.
- Lag. Spooling a turbine takes time; town driving is nothing but transients. (Sound familiar? Turbochargers inherited a mild version of the same complaint.)
- Cost and materials. Turbine wheels live at temperatures demanding exotic alloys — fine amortised over an airliner, ruinous in a family sedan. Chrysler never solved mass-production cost, and the promised cheaper ceramic components stayed perpetually almost-ready.
- Emissions. Continuous high-temperature combustion produces stubborn NOx, just as US emissions law arrived in the 1970s.
Chrysler kept iterating into the late 1970s under government research funding before the program quietly ended. Others took swings too: Rover ran turbine prototypes at Le Mans in the 1960s, and the STP-Paxton turbine car nearly won the 1967 Indianapolis 500 — leading dominantly until a small bearing failed laps from home, after which the rules were rewritten against turbines. Motorsport, at least, took them seriously enough to ban.
The idea that refuses to fully die
Strip the turbine of its worst duty — responding to a throttle — and it gets interesting again. As a steady-speed generator in a hybrid, lag is irrelevant and the turbine runs only at its efficient point: exactly the logic of Jaguar's C-X75 concept (twin micro-turbines charging batteries) and various range-extender startups since. That's the same architectural trick that resurrected the rotary as Mazda's range extender — history suggests unusual engines survive by giving up the wheels.
What this means if you're buying or selling on MotorLoop
You won't find a Turbine Car listed — but the lesson travels: radical drivetrains succeed when their duty cycle suits them, which is worth remembering when weighing any unconventional used car. For the attainable kind of interesting, browse used cars — and if you own something rare that isn't for sale, MotorLoop's showcase listings let you share it without selling it.
Related
- The rotary engine: how Mazda made the Wankel work and why it came back
- Steam, nuclear and six-stroke: car technologies that never took the road
- Showcase your car online: share the car without the hard sell
FAQs
Could the Chrysler Turbine Car really run on any fuel?
Close to it — diesel, kerosene, jet fuel, heating oil and vegetable oils all worked, and Mexico's president famously ran one on tequila. The one fuel Chrysler warned against was leaded petrol, whose additives damaged the turbine. Fuel flexibility was the technology's most genuine advantage.
Why did Chrysler crush most of the 55 Turbine Cars?
The Ghia-built bodies had entered the US under import-duty arrangements that made retaining the fleet after the trial costly, and carmakers routinely destroy experimental fleets to limit liability and support obligations. A handful survived into museums and private collections — including one Jay Leno maintains in running order.
Why don't any cars use turbines today?
Poor part-load fuel economy, throttle lag, NOx emissions and exotic-material costs — each fatal to a mass-market car. The surviving idea is the turbine as a steady-speed hybrid generator, where those weaknesses barely apply; concepts like Jaguar's C-X75 explored exactly that, and the architecture remains plausible for range extenders.