The problem with gas turbines, even if you buffer the energy like you
describe above, is that they are inefficient in city driving environments.
A car driving on surface streets or rush hour traffic spends most of its
time at idle or near idle. If your commute is anything like mine, your
small battery buffer would become full quite quickly, forcing you to idle
the turbine. Since idling turbines are horribly inefficient, I suspect the
actual savings from this configuration would minimal. If we applied
turbine technology to highway driving, then you would see significant gains
in efficiency, but in this instance you don't really need the electrical
conversion anyway.
I've driven a turbine powered car before, and they are very nice. Lots of
power and very smooth acceleration. Supposedly some company is working on
a prototype turbine that can idle nearly as efficiently as a vanilla
internal combustion engine. Turbines actually make a lot of sense if you
are looking for a lot of power in a compact package. The turbine car that
I drove put out in excess of 600 horsepower, but was as fuel efficient as
most sports cars in the 400 horsepower range.
-James Rogers
jamesr@best.com