Collection Classics: Jet Set
April 1, 2008
Still, with Italian bodywork rife with rotational motifs and otherworldly powertrains, the Turbine Cars were undeniably cool. Kendall hasn’t driven the Petersen’s car—and says it’s never been started since it arrived on a long-term loan from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County—but he once got a ride in one of the two cars retained by Chrysler, and remembers it as a singular experience. "From the front, it sounded like a vacuum cleaner," he says. "From the back, it sounded like the vent for a clothes dryer. It was just incredibly smooth and vibration-free. Riding in it was like being a part of the future."
Unfortunately, the turbine-powered future never looked any more imminent than it did with those cars in the early 1960s. Despite the turbine’s practical advantages and novelty, looming challenges like new emissions standards would soon require an all-hands-on-deck engineering onslaught. By the early ’70s, expending manpower to solve the turbine’s idiosyncrasies would’ve been a bit like putting a new coat of paint on your gazebo when there’s a giant hole in the roof of your house.
Like many of the era’s concept cars, most of the Chrysler Turbine Cars met an ignominious end—speared by a forklift and tossed into the crusher’s maw. Because the bodies were built by Ghia in Italy, Chrysler would have had to pay an import tariff, so the majority of the cars were destroyed. Nobody is quite sure how many are left, but Kendall says that five or six Turbine Cars are in museums, Chrysler kept two cars, and one car ended up with a private owner somewhere in the Midwest. The latter might represent the best chance that a Turbine Car would ever come up at auction, because the Petersen car, for one, certainly isn’t on the market. "We’ve been contacted by people who wanted to buy it," Kendall says, "But there’s no question that we’d never sell it."
While modern successors to the Chrysler Turbine car—the limited-production Honda FCX and the Chevy Equinox Fuel Cell, for example—seem to underscore their production feasibility through mundane bodywork that downplays their exotic powertrains, the Chrysler harkens back to an era when exciting alternative propulsion also called for a correspondingly exuberant stylistic statement. The Turbine Car was bold, brash, and full of promise for a future where the rumble of V8s was replaced by the smooth whoosh of turbines. "You saw one of these turbine-bronze vehicles bearing down on you," Kendall says, "and you weren’t likely to forget it."
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