Here's why the government made Chrysler destroy its 46 jet cars

and somebody goes what's that gonna cost to go a billion dollars with a b in 1965. there was a time believe it or not where chrysler made huge advances in actually trying to build a turbine car for the public a turbine powered car now some people have heard of this but most people don't know the extent that chrysler went in this project and that's the startling thing because back in the 1950s a guy came to chrysler an engineer who said you know something they're making great strides in turbine technology and they're a turbine aircraft they're a fighter craft powered by turbines during world war ii on all sides germans had them the british atom and americans were building them shortly thereafter so turbine powered aircraft were becoming very well known and somebody said why don't we put one in a car and so chrysler said you know something we've always experimented with different things sure knock yourself out they set up a little turbine division in highland park consider putting a turbine engine in a car so they got to work and they actually built a turbine engine that was fairly small compared to what you'd see in like say an airplane and it was an automotive turbine so they had to have some different things done had to be a better casing for instance in case one of the blades separated as they say at high speed and so they actually built a turbine engine that they could connect up with a transmission and power a car with and they dropped it into a car in 1953. most people know that chrysler was building turbine cars in the 60s but they put one on the road in 1953. the guy in charge of the program has gotten george huebner george hubner was a an engineer but very very flashy engineer and i jokingly tell people that he was an extroverted engineer which is something that doesn't exist very much in nature and he loved publicity so he would actually call up the press and go hey guys i got a jet powered car you want to see it and a whole swarm of reporters would show up he'd demonstrate the turbine-powered car so he realized people love this stuff because cars after the war was over you know that people were buying cars but there hadn't been any major changes in automotive technology that were this kind of seismic changes so the idea that there'd be a jet powered turbine-powered car would really cause people to go really that's crazy and the interesting thing about a turbine engine in a car is they sound like a turbine engine in an aircraft george huebner realized people love this idea but the cool thing about turbine engines is they have fewer moving parts than a piston engine they don't reciprocate they spin so they run smoother fewer moving parts they run smoother and oh by the way they'll run on anything that burns so they would do demonstrations they'd run it on alcohol kerosene home heating oil vo5 hair spray tequila peanut oil vegetable they would do these demonstrations show it's multi-fuel the weird part is that in the 50s and 60s nobody cared gasoline was cheap it's like saying i have an alternative to water you go it comes out of the wall and i turn the faucet i don't need an alternative water gasoline is the same thing back then so nobody really cared about the multi-fuel aspect of it right away so chrysler has the turbine car george hubner is promoting it he's hoping that if you can get enough people in public to want the car he can convince chrysler to start building the cars and selling the cars there's a major problem though because turbine engines are very very picky in their you know how they're made up they need to have you know exotic metals very very precision parts so there is something that they have to work out with this the technology but it's doable so they get the first car on the road it seems to be running fine upgrade the engine they eventually had a seventh generation engine so seven generations as they improved and proved improved along the way so second or third one they build george hubner announces just so you guys understand how serious we are at chrysler about building turbine engines we're gonna actually drive one cross country so they brought a turbine-powered car to new york city had a thing on the side cross-country turbine trip george hubner is in the front seat holds a press conference to everybody and they drive it cross-country everywhere they go they're doing interviews tv radio newspapers show up it's a huge publicity event that's unbelievable people are clamoring for turbine-powered cars the weird thing is that chrysler's hinting they're going to build them but they've never talked about how expensive they're going to be or anything like that but it's something that george huber's convinced will happen if he gets enough ground support for this so somewhere along the line early 1960s he gets permission to build a fleet of german power cars they actually engage guia in italy to build the cars uh elwood engel who recently come from ford to chrysler designs the cars and he designs a car that's specifically going to be nothing but a turbine car up until this point they dropped the turbine engines in other cars they'd built now they've got a specific purpose-built car that's going to be a turbine-powered car and they call it the turbine car so they build 55 of these cars in italy they ship them over here they bring them to a plant in detroit where they tear them apart they put power trains in them reassemble them and they announce that if you want to drive a turbine car for two months contact chrysler and we're going to draw the names of various people at random and you might get to drive a turbine car for a couple months that's just part of this huge project they got so much attention mountains of postcards being sent in it got all this attention and they started doing this they started delivering cars to people they call you up and say hey congratulations you get a turbine car for two months and they come to your house and oh by the way we're going to call the press they're going to be there too hold a press conference in your front yard of us handing the keys over demonstration maybe let the journalists take it for a drive but for two months you get to drive it all you got to do is put fuel in it if it breaks down give us a call but other than that just drive it around i interviewed people who got those cars they said for two months they were rock stars everywhere they went people would look because it sounds it sounds like a low flying airplane you look and the car is distinctive looking 54 of the cars were painted turbine bronze it's a really cool looking car really cool sounding car i spoke to people who said they would go to the store to buy like a loaf of bread and come out and be a crowd of people around the car they have to show them the car fire the car up take people for drives drive it around i know people who said they got so sick of it they hid the car they come home from work put in the garage close the door a guy told me he forgot to close the garage door and he looked outside there's a school bus stopped and all the kids were coming up to look at his car so they got all this publicity for a couple years people were going insane they wanted to buy these cars chrysler was getting people contacting saying i don't care what the price is i want to buy one here's a check sending them down payments i want one of these cars well here's the thing they knew much it cost to build the cars they're built in italy but they could build cars in america much cheaper so the car cost is not that bad the car actually torque flight transmission in it which is what chrysler was using at the time so they had off-the-shelf technology for that what really mattered though was the cost of the engine and they had done a lot of work through the first four generations of the turbine engine that's the fourth generation turbine engine in the gea they for instance inside a turbine have a bunch of fan discs which have fan blades on them and if you look in the front end of an airplane's jet engine you'll see the fan blades well the fan blades have to be really really perfectly balanced and so on to make sure the thing spins properly chrysler actually developed technology where they could cast those they could cast a disc as a single casting so it's going to save them a ton of money but they did not have any infrastructure in place to start manufacturing turbine engines so somebody actually said you know you got to build a factory from the ground up just to build these engines and somebody goes what's that going to cost to go a billion dollars with a b in 1965 and so they go um that's not going to work so i interviewed the guy who made the call they actually called up a guy who was a pricing guy in chrysler and they often bring him in and say hey what would it cost us to and they'd give them a hypothetical you know take that engine and put it in that car what's it gonna cost us if we wanted to make that car like a foot short or whatever you know and they and they actually said dude it's your job find out what it's gonna cost to mass produce turbine engines and stick them in cars and he went and contacted all the various people and the lowest estimate he got was ten thousand dollars per engine so he went back and he said okay guys here's the problem 318 typical off-the-shelf v8 it's a couple hundred bucks turbine engine 10 grand there's no way you can possibly sell these to public and break even let alone turn a profit no one will buy them that expensive so they kind of buried those numbers and those stories in the press and they just said well we're still working on it we're still working on it and the weird thing that happens though right around this time is that the federal government starts clamping down tail pipe emissions and the turbine engine which will burn on anything it'll burn anything gasoline kerosene diesel doesn't matter the tailpipe emissions were something they never worried about but they started clamping down on things like nox emissions and it turns out that that's one of the things that the turbine engine doesn't do real well with and many companies for instance started with catalytic converters to solve this problem and there was almost no way for them to go back and re-engineer the turbine engine to be as good as it was along with tailpipe emissions that they never saw coming plus chrysler had its first financial troubles shortly thereafter the first time they almost went bankrupt so chrysler downsized their turbine program they called back in the 55 cars they had out there many people saw those cars for instance they had the car at the world's fair and they gave people rides in the world's fair the car was all over the news time magazine new york times everybody had stories about the chrysler amazing chrysler jet car german car whatever they called it they continued building upgraded versions fifth version sixth version and they actually built their last turbine car in 1983 and they had this turbine-powered car that ran just fine but the problem they had with is they could never get the cost of the engine itself down to a point where it made sense and so if you were thinking about buying a car and somebody said okay you can buy a piston engine to car over here or put a turbine engine you know for ten thousand dollar upgrade who's gonna take that and and and interestingly enough it was until the very end of the program where somebody said oh by the way it's multi-fuel what you know and and so there's there's photographs later where they actually show the car hooked up to a display that's got all these different fuels on it that that it can burn but nobody worried about that previously so the program wound up getting mothballed uh in all chrysler built 7b7 or 78 turbine cars total the bronze car that the turbine actually says turbine on it they built 55 of those 54 of them were bronze one of them was white the cars were built in italy they're being imported into america at that time they had a choice to make when you import something from italy you had to either say we're gonna pay full import duties on it or we're gonna bond them and guarantee that we either ship them back out of the country or we destroy them so chrysler when they bought brought over the 55 cars from italy had a choice to make are we going to want to keep all 55 of these if so we have to pay so they actually only paid to keep about 10 of them the other 46 were crushed and burned at a scrap yard in romulus michigan and i interviewed a guy who was there and he said you've never seen more grown men cry literally crying because they designed this car it was hand built in italy by gea and these things were works of art and they had this space age power plant they pulled the motors out of them because the motors weren't imported so you can keep the turbines out but they destroyed the cars of the nine cars that remained they actually offered them to museums so if you want one you can have one so for instance the natural history museum in los angeles has got one the st louis museum of transportation's got one the smithsonian has got one two of them found their way into private hands jay leno's got one and there's a private collector in indiana who's got one because one of the cars got sold to a museum the museum sold at an auction tom monaghan the pizza guy bought it he sold it and then later on that guy got it the sad part is that some of the cars that are out there don't run so there's one at the detroit historical museum that doesn't run it was sent there with uh just the casing for the engine but the internals are missing jay leno's runs in fact i've had the opportunity to drive it which is very nice of him to let let me do that and it's really really cool went out to his place in california we went for drive he drove first and then we switched want to drive my car sure driving around and the cool thing is i've owned a chrysler product from that era i owned a 69 dodge charger when i was in high school i know how the steering felt i know how the transmission felt this car ran just like that it felt just like that but it sounded different we're driving down the street in burbank and people's heads are snapping around it sounds like there's a low-flying airplane coming in a jet coming in but it's not loud it's not like it's so loud that'll blow your mind but it's it's the the whistling whooshing sound people it sounds like a big vacuum cleaner right and so it's one of those things where it was so unusual but so cool the tachometer goes to 60 000 rpm redline is 60. the temperature gauge goes up into the thousands because it's not measuring coolant temperature it's measuring the temperature at the ignition point in the combustion chamber you know that's what you measure on jet apparently so there's so much cool technology that goes into this but right now chrysler still has two of them i've actually got to drive one of those as well uh and the interesting thing is that all these bronze turbine cars they're all identical including the same key will start each and every one of them and the reason i know that is that i interviewed the guy who delivered the cars to the different people who used the cars that program by the way where they lent the car out 203 different families had the car they put over a million miles cumulatively on those cars with almost no problems it proved that the situ you know they were viable they're expensive but they were viable but bill carey the guy i interviewed uh who's in the cover of my book by the way uh bill carrey told me he goes yeah because one key would start the minus otherwise be a nightmare trying to remember which key which goes what because everybody have a fleet of cars they all look alike you can't say this one goes to the bronze turban they're all bronze you know so it was a fascinating concept it was a fascinating project and like i said most people have heard maybe about the turbine car in the middle but they started in 53 and ran through 83 and they built 77 turbine cars but the primary one is the bronze on the middle they had it you know fleet of cars that they lent to the public and chrysler didn't spend a penny for the most part on advertising those cars and they got millions and millions of dollars of free publicity because the turbine car project in the middle was basically a gigantic publicity stunt [Music] you

Channel: VINwiki

Views: 1,672,899

Rating: 4.9277987 out of 5

Keywords: Chrysler, Turbine cars, turbine, jet cars, jay leno, steve lehto, vinwiki, car stories, car history, government, publicity, business model, investment, storytelling, lawyer, federalization, import duties

Id: ZuGvx3WYg1k

Length: 15min 44sec (944 seconds)

Published: Wed May 12 2021