Ideas to Save the World - Turbine Powered Cars

That car is a Jaguar C-X75 concept car built for the Paris Auto Show last year. This is a profound sort of car and here is why. Now this car is a hybrid, and if you follow my blog you know that I have a passionate distaste for hybrids, but the fact that it is a new sort of hybrid in concept is what is exciting. You see the world of hybrids there are two schools of thought. Prius introduced us in a big way to the idea that you make a car with a battery where the engine sometimes powers the battery, and sometimes powers the car itself. When the car doesn't have enough power to run the electric motors the gas engine kicks on to power the battery and drive the car. Then there is the other logic, the logic behind the Volt where the gas engine only spools to recharge the battery and the only method to power the wheel is by the electric motors. This Jag runs on the same idea as the Volt, using gas engines to charge up the battery. But here is the cool thing. Instead of using an engine with pistons and crankshafts, it uses micro turbine engines, similar to what you would see in a jet plane, or in a gas power plant.

Here's why it is brilliant. Turbine engines are miles more efficient then a gas engines, you can use all sorts of fuels with them to make them spin, gas, diesel, ethanol, butanol, whisky, kerosene. Turbines spin much easier then reciprocating engines, and can achieve much higher revs. The ones on that Jaguar are rated to up to 80,000rpm. That is a huge amount of electricity that can be made out of a very small power plant. Also to make the car lighter which is key in fuel efficiency the turbines are much lighter then a engine block and they don't require cooling systems or cycling oil lubrication systems.

But the design isn't without fault and the fault in this instance is... the battery. That is one of the biggest faults with hybrids. Sure the electric motors use a lot more material to get the spinning but not so much that it will be hard to sustain in the future, but batteries use many precious metals that the Earth just doesn't have a lot of. It will one day become a real problem unless a better solution is developed (Carbon tubes). So why not keep the electric motors, and get rid of the battery all together? Instead of storing power have the turbines produce on-demand electricity to keep the car going? A large capacity capacitor may have to be developed to store power during stop starts. but that could work too. Capacitor discharges to give a burst of acceleration and create enough inertia to get the car going while the turbines spool up. That way no power is wasted, it is simply waiting.

An idea such as this shouldn't be too unreasonable. Control systems on cars are getting more and more advanced so it shouldn't be so hard to do something like this. If VolksWagen through the nameplate Bugatti can make a car that can go 268mph and give it a power train warranty, why can't this work. I mean how hard can it be to make a car that can be fuelled by crown royal, powered by miniature jets engines, and work with electricity without an on board battery?