A Good Look at Steam Cars

There is a Website named "Interesting Thing of the Day". The folks who maintain it do a lot of work and sometimes the items they post truly are interesting. I liked this story about steam cars.

Dr. Jerry Everard, a really smart guy, reports "...steam cars are non-polluting because the combustion is complete - even a 1906 Stanley steamer produces so little pollution that it exceeds California's strict emission rules for cars. The only environmental downside is that they typically burn kerosene or petrol (gasoline) which is non-renewable. But steamers can also run on bio-diesel or waste cooking oil - the burners run at high enough temperatures to consume the hydrocarbons almost completely."

Here is an interesting story about the very nicely performing Doble Steam Car.

Bill Lear stands near the top of the fantastic personalities in aviation history. This article gives you a thumbnail biography. Bill did a great deal with steam power. After he sold LearJet Industries he bought the old Stead Air Force Base in Nevada as a testground for steam powered vehicles. The Lear Vapordyne engine used fluorocarbons in place of water because they are easier to condense back into liquid.

Much of the discussion on the Internet claims that Lear caused the failure of his own design by demanding engine start up times that drove the boiler to failure. He felt, rightly or wrongly, that people wouldn't wait more than a minute for their power plant to get up to temperature.

Using his typical approach to publicity, Lear created a race car design and aimed to win the 1970 Indianopolis 500. There are two photos of two cars here. At this link you'll find a wonderful press release from 1973 describing the Lear Steam Bus. There are more links on the Lear Archives Website, but many appear to be broken.

With the price of crude oil today, steam makes a lot of sense.