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The Chrysler Turbine Car
Detroit's Jet-Powered Gamble on the Automobile of Tomorrow

Book Details
About this book:

The Chrysler Turbine Car Imagine a car that sounded like a jet fighter, ran on tequila or Chanel No. 5, and had one moving part. In 1963, Chrysler didn't just imagine it—they built fifty-five of them, handed the keys to schoolteachers, plumbers, and accountants, and said: *Drive this for three months. Tell us what breaks.* Families parked 22,000-rpm turbine engines in suburban garages. Kids rode to Little League in a bronze coupe that exhaled warm, odorless air. Over a million test miles later, the verdict was in: the car worked. Then Chrysler rounded them up and burned forty-six to ash.

*The Chrysler Turbine Car* resurrects Detroit's most audacious gamble—the twenty-year, multi-million-dollar quest to shrink a jet engine for the driveway. Drawing on buried archives and the voices of the engineers and families who lived it, this book traces the story from a secret Highland Park lab through Ghia's Italian coachwork, the 1964 World's Fair spotlight, and the brutal convergence of the Clean Air Act, the oil crisis, and Chrysler's own slide toward bankruptcy that silenced the turbine whistle forever. It was never a conspiracy. It was physics, economics, and history colliding at 50,000 rpm.

What remains are nine survivors, a handful of engineers' notebooks, and a haunting question: what if they'd had just a little more time? Meticulously researched and vividly told, this is the definitive account of the future that arrived early, worked beautifully, and was crushed before the world was ready. For anyone who loves engineering brilliance, industrial tragedy, or the roar of a future that almost was—this is the book you've been waiting for.

Table of Contents:
  • Introduction
  • Chapter 1 The Whistle of the Future: Postwar Dreams and Jet Propulsion
  • Chapter 2 George Huebner and the Secret Laboratory
  • Chapter 3 The Early Testbeds: A 1954 Plymouth Breaks the Silence
  • Chapter 4 Across America on Kerosene: The Transcontinental Run
  • Chapter 5 Breakthroughs in Metallurgy and the Rotary Regenerator
  • Chapter 6 Ghia of Turin: Italian Craftsmanship Meets American Ambition
  • Chapter 7 Designing the Jet Age: The Hand-Crafted Turbine Bronze Coupes
  • Chapter 8 The Engine Room: Inside the A-831 Fourth-Generation Powerplant
  • Chapter 9 The 1964 New York World’s Fair: Detroit's Star Attraction
  • Chapter 10 Selecting the Lucky Few: The Real-World Public Trial
  • Chapter 11 Fifty-Five Families: A Jet Engine in the Suburbs
  • Chapter 12 Teething Troubles: Ignition Lag and Unforgiving Heat
  • Chapter 13 The Fuel Flexibility Myth and Legend: From Tequila to Chanel No. 5
  • Chapter 14 The Mechanical Consensus: What the Public Taught Chrysler
  • Chapter 15 The Great Recall: Gathering the Fifty-Five
  • Chapter 16 The Graveyard of Dreams: The Destruction at the Port of Baltimore
  • Chapter 17 The Survivors: How Nine Cars Escaped the Torch
  • Chapter 18 The Fifth and Sixth Generations: Refining the Machine in the Shadows
  • Chapter 19 Smog, Lead, and the Clean Air Act of 1970
  • Chapter 20 The Unsolvable Riddle: NOx Emissions and Heat Efficiency
  • Chapter 21 The Oil Crisis: When Fuel Economy Crushed the Jet Dream
  • Chapter 22 The Government Bailout and the Seventh-Generation Final Gasp
  • Chapter 23 The Cost Equation: Tooling, Economics, and the Vanishing Gamble
  • Chapter 24 What Might Have Been: Turbines, Ceramics, and Modern Hypercars
  • Chapter 25 The Echo of the Jet Car: Legacy of Chrysler's Boldest Experiment
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Author:

Scott B. James

Published By:

MixCache.com Extended Catalog

Type:

Nonfiction

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