1977 Coal-Powered Turbine Oldsmobile Delta 88
Words by Jalopnik:
What happens when your nation is going through an oil crisis, but you want to keep building big-ass land yachts? You just crush up some of America’s plentiful coal supply, and use that to move the barge down the road, I guess.
Chrysler’s three decade-long turbine program tends to get all the credit, but GM had its own nerdy engineers looking at turbine power as far back as the 1950s. Fast-forward a few decades from then to the second oil crisis i
n 1979, and the General decided to use that expertise to build alternative-fuel turbines— particularly, ones that ran off powdered coal.
Two coal-fed turbine cars debuted in the early 1980s, a 1978 Cadillac Eldorado and the 1977 Oldsmobile Delta 88 you see in the Motorweek video below.
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