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A jet for the road:
This gorgeous vehicle was called »Firebird« and was conceived by inventors at the US automobile company
General Motors
(photo from 1955).
The prototype of the aerodynamic, airplane-like sled was equipped with gas turbines.
Shown here is the Firebird II. Its 1958 successor, the Firebird III, featured seven wings and fins on the fiberglass body, and had a joystick on the center console instead of a steering wheel and pedals.
However, the Firebird never went into series production – it remained an impressive PR stunt.
Photo:
Bettmann Archive / Getty Images
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2/11
Fiat
also
tried its hand at a
gas turbine car
- here an elegant single-seater from
1956
.
In 1955, the journalist Ernst Behrendt expressed his confidence that combustion engines would soon be history: "As far as one can tell, the petrol piston engine has almost disappeared," he wrote in the magazine "Hobby.
The Magazine of Technology« (Ehapa-Verlag).
»Surely there are still a few diesel engines somewhere in a sleepy province, but in the big world the turbine drive has long since established itself.
However, his empire in it is probably short-lived.
Since
nuclear power
has been harnessed to generate electricity for some time now, it may well be possible to use it to power cars as well.”
Photo: v.
Thyssen
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3/11
nuclear power? Yes, please!
In fact, the US car company
Ford presented the
»Nucleon«
at the end of the 1950s, at the height of the nuclear euphoria
.
The vehicle should be operated with a small nuclear reactor in the rear and one filling should be enough for about 8000 kilometers.
At that time it was assumed that the reactors would become significantly smaller over time ...
Photo: FPG / Hulton Archive / Getty Images
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...which was not the case.
Therefore, it remained with a single model - to be admired in the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn (US state of Michigan).
The photo shows the »Nucleon« model with Bill Ford, grandson of Henry Ford I and brother of Henry Ford II.
Photo: Auto-Medienportal.Net / Ford
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5/11
A leap far back into the early history of alternative drives, to a real
fresh-air car:
Strictly speaking,
sailing cars
should not be described as automobiles, i.e. self-propelled vehicles.
Because the force that moves them comes from outside – the wind.
The idea of using wind power to propel vehicles not only on water is old: in the 6th century AD, the Chinese philosopher Kao-ts'ang is said to have invented a wind-powered chariot that was said to be able to transport 30 people a day.
The Flemish engineer and physicist
Simon Stevin invented the first European sailing chariot around 1600
– for Prince Maurice of Orange.
With 28 people on board, the wind carriage is said to have flitted along the coast of Scheveningen (depiction from 1602).
Photo: Quint Lox / Artokoloro / IMAGO
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6/11
Let off some steam:
Steam car traffic
developed in the 19th century
.
From 1803 Richard Trevithick offered the first motorized taxi service
with the "London Steam Carriage"
;
in the 1820s, a first
bus route
followed between Glasgow and Paisley - and then quickly more and more.
Stratford and London were connected from 1831, and from 1835 steam buses also ran regularly between Paris and Versailles.
Here you can see the »Obéissante« (»Obedient«) developed in 1837 by the French automobile pioneer Amédée Bollée, a steam bus with twelve seats that reached speeds of up to 40 kilometers per hour.
Photo: KEYSTONE-FRANCE / Gamma-Keystone / Getty Images
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Charging station
, 1910s version: At the beginning of the 20th century,
electric propulsion
was the most widespread technology for automobiles.
City dwellers in particular relied on electricity - even then with ranges of up to 100 kilometers and more.
Here, a young woman charges her Columbia Mark 68 Victoria using a
private
charging station
offered by Connecticut's Pope Manufacturing Company beginning in 1912.
In 1900, 40 percent of all cars sold in the USA were steam cars,
38 percent were electric cars
and only 22 percent were petrol engines.
Even Henry Ford's wife preferred to drive a silent, highly popular Detroit Electric.
But falling fuel prices and Ford's mass production soon put an end to electric cars - in 1937 the last "Detroit" rolled off the assembly line.
Photo: Schenectady Museum Association/Corbis via Getty Images
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A rolling powder keg:
numerous spectators thronged the Avus test and race track just outside of Berlin when car pioneer
Fritz von Opel
roared by in his cigar-shaped
RAK2 rocket
car in 1928 .
An explosive drive ensured that the car accelerated from zero to one hundred in just eight seconds - and reached an incredible top speed of 238 kilometers per hour.
Von Opel experienced the journey as a major expansion of consciousness: »Everything disappears sideways.
(...) I don't think about it anymore.
Reality disappears.
I only act in the subconscious.
Behind me the raging of irrepressible forces.«
The successors to the RAK2 prototype exploded shortly after takeoff - and the authorities banned further tests.
Photo: AP
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9/11
Hot oven:
A man opens the fuel chamber of his car fueled with
wood gasifiers
in 1967 .
Wood gasifiers became common in times of war due to the lack of conventional fuels: Towards the end of the Second World War, for example, around 500,000 automobiles with the somewhat unwieldy wood gasifiers, also known as “wood gas vans”, were said to have existed in Germany.
In principle, these were stoves attached to the outside of the vehicle: wood was poured into the fuel chamber and ignited;
With the resulting gas mixture, the wood gas, the engine got the car going.
Photo: Alfred Graf / ullstein bild / picture alliance / DPA
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10/11
Sunny future:
The first
solar-powered automobile
was presented in Chicago on
August 31, 1955
- and was just under 40 centimeters long.
With a sun-powered model car, General Motors employee William G. Cobb wanted to show that a car could be made to move without fossil fuels.
The mini-vehicle, equipped with twelve solar cells and an electric motor, was probably way ahead of its time, and it would be many years before solar vehicles were ready for the road.
Photo: Photo: General Motors / wikimedia
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11/11
Fair- weather racing:
In the 1980s, solar propulsion had finally matured to the point where it was also suitable for serious racing.
In the summer of
1985
, the Swiss Solar Systems Association (SSES) held the first road race for solar vehicles: the
Tour de Sol.
The 73 participating vehicles started in five stages on the route from Lake Constance via Winterthur to Lake Geneva.
55 of the futuristic mobiles reached their destination – and the event theirs: the race, which was well received by the press, resulted in a surge in innovation in the field of solar drives.
Photo: Sven Simon / IMAGO
