Leno, with General Motors' Design Chief, Ed Welburn, and Frank Saucedo, who heads the automaker's west coast studio, penned the design concept.
Leno has both a motorcycle and a pickup truck powered by "jet" turbine engines, so the plan was to create an automobile that would run on a similar powerplant fueled by biodiesel.
The EcoJet was initially a static exhibit, but one thing about Jay's Garage is that everything runs. So Jim Hall, Bernard Juchli and the other wizards in the Burbank shop set about to turn the EcoJet from a barely rolling display into a complete running automobile.
What they were mating were a Honeywell LT-101 turbine engine with some 700 bhp and upwards of 500 lb-ft of torque to a GM 4-speed automatic transmission. This driveline was installed amidships in a reworked Corvette aluminum frame surrounded by the carbon fiber body.
Think about the challenge of turning a static show car into a running automobile. Problems like mating the electronics of the turbine to those of the gearbox and then creating a dashboard display so Leno can monitor functions when driving.
Jay Leno with the EcoJet. And all this while the crew was working on other projects from steam machines to muscle cars, because unlike some shops, in Jay's Garage things get done.
Now the EcoJet is a runner...like 150-plus mph in one test. We had a chance to spend a day with Leno and the jet machine and can confirm it is impressive.
Naturally it sounds like a taxiing jet even at idle, great coils of heat roiling out of exhaust vents behind the engine. The EcoJet seems to be cruising just above the road surface and you can imagine the stares it gets on the freeway where it looks like it just swooped in from Star Wars or, perhaps, The Jetsons
No comments:
Post a Comment