The Strangest Car Engine Ever

Click to reserve a copy of our book: → mettlehistory.co.uk ← Remembering the Britain that made things. ——— This is the sound of the strangest engine ever fitted to an American car. For fifty years, Detroit built one kind of engine and spent every one of them refining it — the same pistons, the same valves, the same knock. Once, it built something else entirely. The Chrysler Turbine Car. No pistons. One spark plug, used only to wake it. No radiator, no warm-up. It ran on diesel, kerosene, jet fuel, even vegetable oil — and it idled so smoothly you could stand a coin on its edge while it turned. Chrysler built fifty-five and handed fifty to ordinary families. They came back among the most trouble-free cars Chrysler had ever loaned out. Then, in a scrapyard south of Detroit, that same company crushed and burned forty-six. Not wrecks. Not failures. Proof. Some of the men feeding them in had built those cars by hand. Nine were spared — and the reason is stranger than anyone deciding to save them. It starts twelve years earlier, with the one man who never stopped believing in it.