Much older than that was the Chrysler Turbine car:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrysler_Turbine_Car

This was quite literally a lower power jet aeroplane turbine used to power the car.

I would imagine that this would have been great on fuel economy on the highway, but terrible in cities.

That seems to have used a "conventional" mechanical transmission rather than using the turbine to generate electricity to feed the electric motors.

Still pretty cool though!

If you're interested there is a very good book called Chrysler's Turbine Car: The Rise and Fall of Detroit's Coolest Creation.

http://www.amazon.com/Chryslers-Turbine-Car-Detroits-Creatio...

>great fuel economy on the highway

Small turbines generally have terrible fuel economy. The Wikipedia page you quote says "...fuel consumption was excessive"

This is what I was thinking about too. Rotation is better than reciprocal line movement.

While in terms of reliability, simplicity and power to weight ratios turbine engines are great, they still suffer from low compression ratios.

If I remember correctly about 3 to 1, compared to 10 in 1 for petrol engines and nearly 20 to 1 for diesel engines.

Thermodynamically this makes it very difficult to achieve high efficiency.

"If I remember correctly about 3 to 1,"

That seemed strange to me given multistage compressors. Maybe 3:1 is true for a micro turbines, but for larger jets wikipedia says the pressure ratio is 30:1 to 40:1 citing the Trent 900 at 39:1 and the GE90 at 42:1.

Which according to the same article says that a 40:1 PR is equivalent to a 15:1 compression ratio.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overall_pressure_ratio

I stand corrected. I'm sure I had read that some time ago but I can't find a reference at the moment.