I was promised . . . turbines

I think Peter Thiel is wrong. I don’t remember anyone promising ME flying cars.

Not that I didn’t dream about them. I grew up in the Fifties, a period of wretched excess in automotive styling in my hometown Detroit: Too much chrome and too little taste. Even the dream cars from European auto shows of that period seemed oddly disconnected from reality.

So I spent a lot of time imagining the future of transportation. By the time the Jetsons TV show arrived in the early 1960s, Motown auto designers were already beginning to sketch extraterrestrial vehicles. Ironically, everything I was crudely drawing at home and in school still had wheels, even as my imagination soared.

Things crashed not long after that. Growing up in the ‘burbs in the Sixties, my parents’ ever-expanding family spent way too much time in the back seats of garden-variety station wagons — a Ford Falcon, a Ford Fairlane and, in my senior year in high school, a hideous green Rambler wagon (proudly described by my father to the neighbors as “goose poop green”).

There was a brief moment of relief and wonder the day my father drove home a metallic bronze two-door hardtop coupe borrowed from Chrysler for a weekend test drive. It was pretty slick for 1963, with big round headlamps and a vaguely futuristic tail, hinting at the unusual propulsion system under the skin: A gas turbine engine, an unusual Space Age powerplant for a car, similar in concept to much larger and more powerful turbines used in jet aircraft, but allegedly able to run on a wide variety of combustible liquids, from perfume to tequila.

So far, that’s the closest I’ve come to a “flying” car. I kept a scale model of the Chrysler Turbine on my bookshelf for years. The actual vehicle never went into production; I believe Chrysler built only 50 or so prototypes, most of which were scrapped when the turbine was deemed unfeasible for automotive use. Fortunately, there is at least one example, tucked away in a corner of the Henry Ford Museum In Dearborn, Michigan.

I still imagine future vehicles — terrestrial, aerial, marine — will feature energy sources and propulsion systems that are nothing like what we’re using today. Electric motors and battery packs surely won’t be the only alternative to internal combustion engines and fossil fuels.

Who knows? There may even be a turbine in my future.