I’m Sorry, But It Has What Kind Of Engine?

What’s that old joke about it being a good thing that England is an island because the British are, by and large, nuts?

Well here’s example #645,643,985.

The car in question is a Dax Rush, essentially one of umpteen copies of the seldom equaled Lotus 7.

What differentiates this particular Dax Rush from all the others is it’s choice of engines.

Sure sure, there have been 7s with V8s, V6s all manner of turboed and supercharged 4 bangers, not to mention three versions that have high output bike engines (Hyabusa, Fireblade, and one other I can’t think of at th’mo), and one that has a V8 made from two Hyabusa fours (because the regular Hyabusa is such a wimpy mill), but this one has got to take the cake.

This one, is powered by a turbine engine form a Bell Jet Ranger helicopter.

I’ll say that again, just to make sure you heard me: this one, is powered by a turbine engine.

Now, I can find nothing about how this car drives, and, sadly, I’m pretty sure that it probably won’t be that much fun, or as much fun as you’d think. See, turbines are fine, if expensive powerplants. They’re low maintenance (relatively), they can run on a variety of fuels, quiet (in certain ways) and really, really efficient for their size & power output.

They have one big flaw when it comes to auto applications though: they take weeks to accelerate.

From the time you stand on the gas of a turbine, it has to suck in a lot of air, run it through a fan that has to spool up to a certain RPM, that air gets compressed, then it is run through more (sometimes several, in the case of airplanes) fan stages, each taking time to get up to speed, has some fuel injected into the compressed air, then the whole thing is set afire and then you finally get the power output you’ve been waiting for.

Decades ago, Chrysler looked into building turbine cars for the road, they even build a couple dozen as working prototypes. I remember reading R & T’s test of it; they said it was amazingly smooth & quiet and it would get beaten off the line by an ice cream truck.

Remember when Andy Granatelli ran the STP sponsored turbine cars at Indy? Look at any of the restarts and you’ll see what I mean.

So sadly, I bet this 7 variant is a nicely done engineering exercise, but not nearly as fun as you’d think.

Oh, and I read about this on Jalopnik, in case you’re wondering.

More pictures after the jump.

Filed Under: Lotus