In the early 1960s, Chrysler did something that still sounds unreal: it built a small fleet of turbine-powered cars and handed them to ordinary American families. The Chrysler Turbine Car was not a dream car that only spun on a turntable under auto show lights. It was a running, driving experiment wrapped in Italian bodywork by Ghia, painted in a color called Turbine Bronze, and sent into the real world to see if Americans could live with a jet-age automobile.
The car looked like the future, but not in a cartoonish way. It had clean two-door hardtop proportions, smooth fenders, four bucket seats, and styling that felt expensive without being outrageous. The real strangeness was under the hood. Instead of pistons, spark plugs, and the normal rhythm of an internal-combustion engine, the Turbine Car used a gas turbine that could run on a wide variety of fuels. Period stories often emphasized that it could burn gasoline, diesel, kerosene, jet fuel, and even more unusual liquids, giving it a kind of anything-goes mechanical mystique.
Chrysler built 55 Turbine Cars between 1963 and 1964, with 50 used in a public test program. From late 1963 into early 1966, 203 drivers in cities across the United States were given one for about three months at a time. They were not celebrities or race drivers. They were regular people chosen to test whether a turbine car made sense in daily life.
A Car From Tomorrow in an Ordinary Driveway
That public test is what makes the Chrysler Turbine Car so fascinating. Imagine looking out your window in 1964 and seeing your neighbor warming up a bronze Ghia-bodied Chrysler that sounded more like an airport than a suburban coupe. It was futuristic, but it had to do ordinary jobs: start in the morning, idle in traffic, carry groceries, haul families, and survive drivers who had never operated anything remotely like it.
The user program reportedly covered 203 motorists and more than one million miles. Chrysler wanted feedback on fuel economy, reliability, durability, drivability, and public reaction. In many ways, it was one of the most ambitious real-world alternative-powertrain experiments ever conducted by an American automaker. The Turbine Car was not perfect. Turbines could be thirsty, emissions were a challenge, and the driving experience was different from a conventional V8. But the sheer seriousness of the program is still remarkable.
The story also resonates because it belongs to a very specific American moment. The Space Age was in full swing. Jet travel was glamorous. Automakers were promising tailfins, rockets, aircraft-inspired dashboards, and cars that looked ready to launch into tomorrow. The Chrysler Turbine Car was one of the rare cases where the jet-age fantasy was not just styling. It actually had a turbine.
Why Almost All of Them Were Destroyed
The strangest part of the story came after the test program ended. Chrysler rounded up the cars and destroyed most of them. Of the 55 Turbine Cars built, only nine are known to survive today. Old Cars Weekly reports that Chrysler destroyed 46 examples after public testing and display, with most scrapped near Detroit and another destroyed at its Chelsea Proving Grounds. It didn’t exactly become a missing car worth millions, but it is indeed rare and spendy.
That destruction gave the Turbine Car a mythology far beyond its engineering. It was already rare, but then it became almost extinct. A handful went to museums, Chrysler kept some, and at at least two eventually reached private hands, including the well-known example owned by Jay Leno. The second that was in private hands was part of the Kleptz collection before being sold to Stahl’s Auto Museum. (The photos in this article are of that car and taken by me, the creator of this site, as I provided marketing support to the selling dealer, Hyman LTD.) A few surviving cars remain operational, which means the Turbine Car is not just a static memory. It can still make that strange, smooth, aircraft-like sound that once convinced people the piston engine’s days might be numbered.
The Chrysler Turbine Car never became the family car of the future. Detroit stayed with pistons, gasoline, and V8s for decades. But as a story, it may be even better because it failed so dramatically. Chrysler built a jet-age car, let regular Americans drive it, then crushed almost all of them. For anyone who loves strange cars, missing cars, rare factory experiments, and the big optimistic promises of postwar America, the Turbine Car remains one of the greatest “can you believe this really happened?” machines ever built.
