Javillac
The historic North American group General Motors announced its plans to produce only electric vehicles from 2035. And although the company has always tried to innovate within this changing industry, In the sixties they were concerned with finding alternatives to the combustion engine Traditional.
Although at that time many companies were developing some electric prototype and even General Motors flirted with the new rotary or Wankel type engines, From Detroit they tried to recover a practically lost technology, but which had great importance in the dawn of the automobile industry; steam cars.
The steam cars They were of great importance at the beginning of the 20th century, becoming even more popular than gasoline cars before the invention of the electric starter. The rapid evolution of the internal combustion engine meant that complex steam vehicles eventually disappeared. In the 1920s, given the complexity of these systems, as well as the dangers and challenges involved in incorporating them into a production car, although brands such as Doble managed to greatly improve these cars.
1969: A STEAM-POWERED CHEVROLET AND PONTIAC
By the end of the 1960s, steam cars were almost an anecdotal episode in the history of the pioneering brands. At that time, American manufacturers faced a series of new challenges, the main one being to put a short-term remedy to excessive emissions of many of the models they produced.
For this reason, General Motors decided to develop a pair of prototypes powered by external combustion steam engines. The reason was that these engines were much lighter than a conventional gasoline engine, although a boiler had to be included, which ended up adding a lot of weight to the whole, but above all Their carbon monoxide emissions were tiny compared to and easily adjustable.
The first prototype created in 1969 was based on a Chevrolet Chevelle of the same year and received the internal name of SE-124. This experimental car recovered patents from the Doble vehicles of the XNUMXs. an engine created by Bill Besler that only managed to produce 50 HP of power and allowed the Chevy to reach a top speed of just 100 kilometers per hour.
Moreover, General Motors' own engineers developed their own steam engine and they decided to mount it in a 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix given the long hood and spacious engine bay that this model had. This project was christened SE-101, and although its results were better than those of the Chevrolet, they were still quite disappointing.
The new engine had the advantage of being able to run on any type of atomized fuel, something that was already happening with the Chrysler turbine cars. But the power was of only 140 hp, less than half of a conventional V8 of those years and with an added weight of more than three hundred kilosThese reasons, added to the complexity of the mechanics themselves, were enough for the project to not go any further and fall into oblivion, with the Chevelle as the only surviving piece of those curious experiments to date.
Images: GM, Double
