What a peculiar policy. I guess they are gambling on people not knowing the SAAB making cars is not the jet fighter-making one.
AH challenge: turbine engines more widespread
- Thread starter Hendryk
- Start date
The US ad campaign states Saab was "born from" jet fighters and not that the company makes jet fighters and automobiles.
It's a subtle point but it lets them lie without actually lying.
Thande
Donor
Somehow that doesn't surprise me.
Here's an Eighties example of such an advert, I can't find more recent ones but they do exist.
Interesting idea, but it has one serious problem - the nuclear element. Three Mile Island killed the prospect of new nuclear plants in the 80s, unless the nuclear industry and the government really, REALLY cleaned up the act. The idea would have been worth persuing, of course.
In both 1963 and 1965, they were the fastest British car in the race. I'd call that a little more than reasonably well, honestly. I've wondered why Rover, BRM and Rolls-Royce after 1965 didn't drop the gloves and build something to hunt the Ford GT40 and Ferrari 330, particularly with Jaguar's XJ13 on the drawing board by then. The addition of regenerators to the Rover-BRM made the thing have shockingly-good fuel economy for a car, and if one was to add diesel into the equation, you could have had a shot at winning it all.
No, they did race it. The Lotus 56, which used a Pratt and Whitney gas turbine engine, was a monster - 500+ horsepower was good, but the 1100+ foot-pounds of torque was even better. The thing had so much beans that the 56 needed its four-wheel-drive even at Indianapolis. Joe Leonard was running away with the race when the engine's torque snapped the fuel pump drive shaft with nine laps remaining. GTs are fantastic for Indianapolis, because the motor is at high revs all the time, which reduced the problems with fuel consumption.
If we're looking at the locomotives here, I have to bring up these:
The top one is the three-unit Union Pacific "Big Blow" gas turbine, to this day still the most powerful single locomotive to even run on American rails at no less than 8500 horsepower. Union Pacific calculated that on a flat track one of those turbines could move more than seven hundred freight cars, and they regularly moved trains of 13,000+ tons on UP's transcontinental main line between Odgen, Utah and Council Bluffs, Iowa. The only reason these engines were retired was fuel costs. They had been designed to use Bunker C fuel, which is extremely heavy fuel oil that the tenders had to heat up to 200 degrees Fahrenheit before the locomotives could use it, and new uses in plastics and other industries made the fuel more expensive and doomed the engines.
The second engine is even crazier. It was Union Pacific and General Electric's attempt to fix the problem of fuel costs by running it on coal. It looks like a Frankenstein because it is, effectively, an Alco PA passenger diesel front, a Great Northern W-1 electric locomotive in the middle that had had its guts torn out and replaced with a gas turbine and a Big Boy tender with the water tank replaced with a coal crusher. It had maintenance problems right from the start, but when it worked, it worked very well indeed - 7000 horsepower delivered over 12 powered axles, which would undoubtedly mean immense tractive effort.
All UP gas turbines combined diesel start engines with the turbines, with the goal of the big engines getting the train going before the turbine cranked up and got it going considerably faster. The maintenance problems were primarily related to soot building and corrosive exhaust causing the turbine blades to erode, problems which the coal burner magnified. I've wondered honestly if anybody ever thought of trying to use these things on natural gas instead of heavy fuel oil or pulverized coal.
Thanks, TheMann, for posting and v. glad to see you back at it.
Just a couple of points. iirc (and the wikipedia seems to agree), the Lotus 56 was a further development of Andy Granatelli's turbine car that almost won the Indy in 1967 and also raced in 1968.
As to turbine locomotives, the Swedes had a steam turbine used successfully during the Great Patriotic War era for hauling heavy loads of iron ore. The Pennsy had a similar design but the Pennsy never really developed it fully. Both these were steam turbines. IIRC, both the C & O and the Norfolk & Western had steam turbine-electric locomotives. Both were major coal haulers, so coal powered locomotives made sense.
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Thank you for the compliment. This sort of thing is my specialty, so I had to make an appearance.
It was based on the idea Granatelli came up with and Parnelli Jones drove, yes. But the car itself was designed and built by Lotus, and would be further evolved into the Lotus 56B and 63 Grand Prix cars, neither of which were particularly successful, though on a wet track the 56B owned its competition like a cheap suit, as evidenced by Emerson Fittipaldi's dominant qualifying performance with the 56B in the 1971 F1 Race of Champions at Brands Hatch. The car was just too complicated, and subsequently too fragile. At Indy, the turbines were banned after 1968 and the subsequent development of turbocharged cars, which first became common in 1971 and 1972, had power that would have blown the turbines into the weeds - some of the bigger-boosted Ford, Chevrolet and Offenhauser engines of the time were making 1200+ horsepower, so Lotus would have been forced to either get a bigger engine or accept a power disadvantage, which at Indianapolis is devastating.
I was actually pointing out that the Union Pacific example was a gas turbine that ran on pulverized coal. The N&W and C&O steam turbines were another matter entirely, though as you point out, both of those are coal haulers who move very heavy trains over mountain ranges, so they, along with Pennsylvania/Penn Central/Conrail, Burlington Northern and the Santa Fe would be natural companies interested in gas turbine locomotives because of the power of them. Steam turbines are another something entirely, but they idea of steam-turbine electric engines could give immense power, they were all complicated machines and it was simply cheaper and easier to buy existing General Motors, General Electric, American Locomotive Company or Fairbanks-Morse diesels. The main reason UP went for turbine power is because its transcontinental mainline over the Wasatch Range in Utah and Wyoming is a monster of a main line, and the line between Odgen and Council Bluffs is one of the busiest freight railroads in the world. When you need to move many very large and very heavy trains, you either need a whole bunch of diesels (Santa Fe's coal drags in the Western United States in the 60s and 70s often had as many as ten or twelve engines on the point) or something with more power. For UP, the answer was the turbines. If the fuel costs hadn't doomed them, they would probably still be in use, because these were 1950s-era turbines, which means a modern such unit is probably going to be both considerably more power and far more fuel efficient.
NothingNow
Banned
As Lord Insane said they were the same company up until 1990/2000 (depending on how you look at it.) GM only held something like 51% of the SAAB Automobile AB stock (As opposed to SAAB AB) from 1990 to 2000. Now it's owned by a Dutch Supercar builder. That's a proper level of eccentricity for SAAB.
Also: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HIHFr1UnNC8&feature=related - 2006 US Born From Jets Campaign.
The Airshow Display (2006): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYi3iiwgHKY