| Turbine-powered cars enjoyed a brief period where the public was largely fascinated by the concept in the 1950s and '60s, but the infatuation pretty much died along with the space age. Chrysler is bringing a bit of that Motorama-style mojo back with an extremely orange-colored 300S sedan called, semi-appropriately enough, the Turbine edition. The one-off sedan debuted at the 2013 Detroit auto show and was created to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the limited-production 1963 Chrysler Turbine Car, a unique ride with which it shares its Turbine Bronze hue, if not its level of gloss. Before you get too excited, allow us to take some of the fan blades out of your turbine by noting that the 300S Turbine edition is not powered by a turbine. Instead, it gets the 300S's V-6 mated with an eight-speed automatic transmission. But it has a cool paint job: The orange paint is of the matte-finish variety, and it's set off by a black-painted roof (just like the original's black vinyl-covered job), window trim, and headlight and taillight accents. Chrysler fitted the Turbine edition with a set of pleasingly Saab-like, turbine-styled wheels; the meaty rims measure 22 inches in diameter and feature 20 machined spokes. Finally, there's a billet aluminum grille and lower intake insert that match a set of platinum-finished side mirror caps. Where It All Began As for the original Turbine Car, it was a dreamer's dream car that actually saw some customer use. Chrysler built 55 of the two-door, four-passenger coupes, putting 45 of those into the hands of real people for three-month trials between 1963 and 1966. Though Chrysler penned the car's shape, the Turbine's body was assembled by Ghia of Italy and shipped back to the U.S., where it was paired with the unique transmission and a chassis. (The photos you see here are original Chrysler press images that we dug out of our archives; you can see more in the gallery below.) A few of our favorite Turbine features include its jet-intake-style front headlight surrounds, jet-exhaust-style taillight treatment, nifty turbine-patterned wheel and tire detailing, and its tachometer that lists rpms for the power turbine in 5,000-unit intervals up to 60,000. (In reality, the power turbine could spin to only 45,700 rpm—take that, Wankel!) That power turbine lived in a twin-shaft engine that pumped out 130 hp and 425 lb-ft of torque. Since we usually deal in pistons, crankshafts, pushrods, cams, and the like here at C/D, allow us to provide a brief refresher on how the car's regenerative turbine engine works. It essentially is made up of four key components: an air compressor, two heat exchangers, and two shafts—one of which is an output shaft. Air enters the front of the engine and is immediately compressed in the air compressor before being warmed by the heat exchangers (one exchanger sits on each side of the engine); next, fuel is sprayed into the compressed, heated air and ignited. After the air/fuel mixture burns at more than 1800 degrees fahrenheit, the resulting hot gases are directed through vanes attached to both the front shaft (which drives the compressor) and the power turbine's vane (which drives the output shaft), spinning them. The gases are again routed through the heat exchangers (providing the heat for the earlier step in which the intake air is warmed) before being exhausted. The Turbine car's turbine engine was bolted to a mildly modified—it lacked a torque converter—Chrysler TorqueFlite three-speed automatic transmission. Why no torque converter? Because the flow of hot gas that drives the power turbine's vanes pretty much mimics a typical torque converter's fluid coupling, so keeping the TorqueFlite's unit would be redundant. Intriguingly, the turbine engine could run on pretty much any combustible fuel, from gasoline to diesel, or even vodka.
Back to the Future Do we wish Chrysler had decided to actually fit a 300S with a turbine engine? Of course, but reality—and budgets for tributes to experimental cars past—make that a thin possibility. More interesting than any alternative engine technologies for Chrysler's past and future pet projects is the Turbine edition's paint itself. A Chrysler representative told us that the company is taking a serious look at matte paint for production on special or high-performance models. While no specifics were given, it's safe to assume that cars like the Fiat 500 Abarth, maybe a Jeep Wrangler or two, and anything with an SRT badge would make decent candidates. Plus, Chrysler wouldn't be entering uncharted waters—several full-line automakers offer matte paint, including Hyundai, BMW, and Mercedes-Benz. What about a matte-finished, turbine-powered SRT Vip—okay, we'll stop.  from Car and Driver Blog http://blog.caranddriver.com | |||
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