As Ford was trying to load a fission reactor in their Nucleon, Chrysler was hopping up concept cars with jet engines. By tweaking the air/fuel mixture, they could run on jet fuel, unleaded, diesel, kerosene, and vegetable oil...almost anything flammable.

In the early '60s, "muscle car" meant many things, and one of them was turbine. By 1963, Chrysler developed their fourth generation turbine that produced 130 brake horsepower and a whopping 425 ft.-lbs. of torque at up to 60,000 rpm. Simple and elegant, turbine's only had 60 moving parts, a fifth less than a comparable combustion engine.

By 1966, the fifth generation turbines were being fitted to Dodge Chargers and Coronet 500s for testing, as plans were under way for retail sales. Sadly, ever tightening emissions standards held back mass production, but research continued for another 15 years. Turbine power plants produced no carbon monoxide or hydrocarbons, but taming the nitrogen oxide they expelled proved to be overwhelming.

Flex fuels aren't a new idea and "alternative power" cars haven't just been living in Japan. We've got some amazing automobile heritage right here in America, so why not take a minute and read more about it.