Jay Leno/ GM EcoJet
 

This thing is kind of neat, it's a turbine powered car based on a Corvette chassis that uses unique technologies supporting biofuel and other altruisms. Jay Leno has a fun series of videos exclusively devoted to car culture.

Pretty damn cool. Leno has some nice toys and really values them.

Thanks cub.

Yeah I like Jay Leno and his program of restoring and driving old cars. He is rich, funny, and studies the subject well enough to do the subject some justice.

Turbines do not work well as powerplants for cars though, they need to to run at high rpm for efficiency. They end up wasting an enormous amount of fuel unless they are used at a high percentage of their usable rpm range for long periods of time without much variation. At best you would need a smaller powerplant for local driving to keep efficiency high, which doubles the cost of the car. Therefore this Eco-car is not a good idea. A few years ago another celebrity tinkerer, Neil Young, tried to make a turbine car and found the same thing. And of course Chrysler threw a ton of money at turbine cars in the 60s and decided it was not worth pursuing. Their hope was through economies of scale the turbines would be pretty cheap to make and gas would be cheap a long time too.

Linc Volt hybrid car

What if you had a very small turbine that was used for nothing more than turning a generator, which then powers either directly to motors or to a battery pack.

An early version of the Link Volt did exactly that (or still does, I forget)- it is a valid way to extend the usable range of an all electric vehicle past its battery range.

Land Rover also toyed with that idea and decided against it for some reason, going so far as to design and make the first prototype miniature axial-flow turbine engine designed for a car (or SUV). All other automotive turbines were centrifugal. I forget why they gave up on it, but it was a neat idea and the turbine was really cool- it looked like a miniature JT-15D.

That's sweet!