Your half right.   The engine produced exceptional power but couldn't
pass a gas station.  It was a pig on fuel.

Pete

From what I know, turbine-powered cars were experimented with as far
back as the 1950s.  There were some notable problems.  It took a long
time for a gas turbine to "spin up" before it could produce power, and
turbines don't like to be throttled -- they work best when run at a
constant speed.

A small gas turbine might make a lot of sense in a series hybrid
vehicle.  It could be more efficient than a piston engine, it could
produce more power in a lightweight package, and it could be adapted to
multi-fuel usage pretty easily.  In a hybrid the engine can run at a
constant speed (because all it does is run a generator), and the
spin-up time is no concern.

If hybrids catch on widely, and especially plug-in hybrids, then I
wouldn't be surprised to see turbine engines experimented with again at
some point -- or maybe some other types of engines, such as
Wankel/Rotapower.  But I don't expect it to happen for a while because
reciprocating piston engines are what car companies already have, and
it's what they already know.  They already feel they are venturing into
risky territory with an electric drivetrain, so adding an
unconventional engine is probably far from their minds right now.

Flywheels have some significant disadvantages for mobile operations -
imagine what a huge gyroscope does to a vehicle when it tries to change
direction (left or right, or up and down).

Flywheels also can be dangerous. Imagine what happens when a bearing fails,
or what might happen to a flywheel in an accident.

Flywheel drive systems are complicated. Actually the system to drive the
flywheel and then recover the energy is likely to be an order of magnitude
more complicated than the Prius battery system.

Few people recall that Ford was very close to introducing a gas turbine
engine for heavy truck use in the early 70's. Ford was well into the
pre-production phase when they abandoned the project (to the point that the
turbine engine was part of the standard Ford Part Number Scheme). The stated
reason for the abandonment was the inability of Corning to produce
regenerator disks at a reasonable price. In prototype quantities the ceramic
regenerator disks worked as designed.These disks were used to recover waste
heat from the exhaust and return it to the incoming air charge to preheat
the air after the compressor stage and before the burners. The disk rotated
through the exhaust and were heated and then were cooled as they heated the
incoming charge. This was necessary in order to get the efficiency up to a
level as good (or better) that diesels of the day (late 60's to mid 70's).
When Corning tried to scale the production of the disks up to production
levels, the yield was so bad the whole project became uneconomic. I also
suspect the major diesel engine manufacturer's made Ford an offer they
couldn't refuse to drop the project (i.e., a better deal on diesel engines).
When I was in Dearborn in the late 70's there were still building direction
signs that referred to the turbine engine project. Too bad Ford gave up on
it around 1975.

http://media.ford.com/newsroom/release_display.cfm?release=14119
http://www.memagazine.org/backissues/september97/features/ceramic/ceramic.html

Ed