The Steam Car: The Little Car that Could

Article Tools

Image Gallery

Print

E-mail

Comments

RSS

But these people CAN, at a profit, produce steam cars. In the early days of automobiling, plants with only a few men in them made such cars, a few cars a week at most, of course. There won't be enough of these cars made to worry Detroit much . . . not unless more people get the same idea.

BUT . . . these cars will travel at the same speeds, with greater safety, than gas cars. They will use kerosenes, No. 2 oil, old candle ends or dead cats, but what they burn will not come out as poison gas, nor will the rapidly depleting fuel reserves of our planet be burned nearly as fast. They do NOY need shifts; nor do they need automatic transmissions. The Stanley had a total of seventeen moving parts, and the Stanley still holds the stock model speed record for a run at Daytona beach in the early 1900s.

They will have drawbacks . . . but please note, they won't explode. And just incidentally, a gasoline car will, and often does, to the surprise of its driver . . . if he survives.

One drawback, for instance, would be a short time, up to three minutes, required to warm up to driving power from a totally cold engine. (Most Americans seem to believe that a gasoline engine does not need to be warmed before zooming off. They stay with this belief firmly, in spite of blue oil smoke clouds billowing from half-oiled and burned up engines . . . oh, well.)

They need water from time to time . . sometimes as often as every couple of hundred miles. Filling a tank with water is almost as time consuming, but not as expensive, as filling a tank with gasoline at forty-five heavily taxed cents per gallon. Isn't it?

But there's one enormous drawback to a steam car . . . if you happen to be a garage mechanic, or a shop owner. They require only about a tenth as much repair work, most of it fairly simple; and they last, and last, and LAST. (There's a beautiful steamer running around these parts, wearing a Packard body as a disguise; but under that 1940 tin beats the stout pulse of a 1915 Stanley.)

All right. There's your commune, building a car or so a week; selling them at a price which is about the same as the price of a 1969-70 gasbuggy. Who's buying?

Take a choice. A 1970 GM product, made of materials that you damned well know are inferior, if you know beans about engineering. Assembled by men who hate their jobs, who do not, literally, give a damn. Sold by hucksters who do not care if your car collapses under you, once the financing contract is signed. It will last, at best, five or six years. It will depreciate in value to half what you paid for it, the day you drive it out of the showroom. It will need constant repairs, expensive ones, and half the time you'll be solidly skinned by the mechanic you take it to.

RSS | Comments | E-mail | Print