please no — It seemed like a good idea at the time: 9 car designs that went nowhere Flying cars, amphicars, two-engined cars, steam carsnot every idea is a good one.

Larry Printz – Oct 4, 2023 11:35 am UTC EnlargeMichael Reinhard | Getty Images reader comments 139 with

Ford Motor Company had a better idea, as it once advertised, producing such iconic cars as the Mustang, Bronco, Thunderbird, and Model T. But it also built the ill-fated Edsel. Ford wasn’t alone, either; many inventors and engineers have produced cars that seemed like a good idea until they actually acted on it. Here are a few examples. 1899 Horsey Horseless

Kellogg’s cereal wasn’t the only product to emanate from Battle Creek, Michigan. The Horsey Horseless also came from there, although it’s unknown whether this vehicle was ever actually built. Still, it was a solution to a common problem in the early days of motoring, when automobiles were still uncommon and scared horses. Uriah Smith thought that sticking a horse head on the front of a horseless carriage would prevent horses from getting upset upon seeing one.

“It would have all the appearance of a horse and carriage and hence raise no fears in any skittish animal,” he wrote. “Before he could discover his error and see that he had been fooled, the strange carriage would be passed, and then it would be too late to grow frantic and fractious.”

He also recommended making the horse head hollow so it could also serve as a fuel tank. A patent drawing of the Horsey Horseless.Public Domain

It also made one hell of a hood ornament. 1902 Stanley Steamer

When the car was first invented, it was powered by gasoline. But gasoline-powered cars were noisy and smelly, and they had to be hand-cranked to be started, which frequently caused injuries or even death. Then there were electric cars, which had limited range due to their lead acid batteries. Steam was familiar, having powered American industry for the better part of the 19th century.

Cars built with steam power proved popular, but they were complex, as they had three tanks. One contained water for the boiler, another held kerosene or home heating oil to heat the water, and a third usually held gasoline to keep the pilot light burning. Finally, an acetylene torch was needed to light the pilot light. Advertisement

And you had to wait for the water to boil and create steam before you could drive anywhere. Also, these were not intuitive machines, as they had copper tubes and pipes, boilers, condensers, valves, and gauges. And if they backfired, they could seriously scald the driver. Finally, the Stanley Steamer’s water tank had to be refilled every 3050 miles (4880 km), but the company felt drivers could refill their water tanks at any brook, pond, or horse trough. Enlarge / Photograph of a Stanley Steamer, ca. 1902.Bettmann/Getty Images

Ultimately, it was the electric starter that doomed steam cars. First seen on the 1912 Cadillac Model 30, it allowed drivers to take off without waiting anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes to get started. It was also far cheaper to run.

But the company survived until 1927. The last steam car was built in 1931. 1907 Carter Two-Engine

When the engine in the car that Howard O. Carter was driving developed mechanical problems many miles from home, Carter did what anybody in his situation would do in the early days of the automobile: He built his own car, albeit with a spare four-cylinder engine.

Dubbed the Carter Two Engine, it also had two radiators, two ignitions, and two exhaust systems. The engines were mounted side-by-side and were connected, according to a contemporary account in the Smithsonian Magazine, “through cone clutches in the flywheels and by Morse silent chains, to a single three-speed transmission placed in the center of the car.”

Once started, one four-cylinder engine was used until the driver needed more power. The driver then engaged the second engine’s clutch, which started the second powerplant, thereby doubling the vehicle’s horsepower to 40 ponies, allowing the car to power onward without having to downshift.

But the second engine wasn’t merely there to add power; it was also an insurance policy in case the first engine broke down.

The car was priced at $2,250, or $70,185 adjusted for inflation, and Carter trumpeted the vehicle’s introduction as “the birth of an epoch of transportation unparalleled in the history of the world.” Few customers agreed. Within a year, the company’s factory in Hyattsville, Maryland, was building a car called the Washington, which proved somewhat more successful. It lasted until 1912, albeit with one engine rather than two. Page: 1 2 3 Next → reader comments 139 with Advertisement Promoted Comments jlredford I’ve been in an Amphicar! There’s a classic car show every summer in Naples, Maine that has several of them. You can hop in and go cruising around Long Lake. The freeboard is pretty low, so you really want to do this on a calm day, and you don’t go faster than walking pace, but it’s a lot of fun. It’s more proof that fans will keep cool things working forever. October 4, 2023 at 12:36 pm IncreaseMather And you had to wait for the water to boil and create steam before you could drive anywhere. Also, these were not intuitive machines, as they had copper tubes and pipes, boilers, condensers, valves, and gauges. And if they backfired, they could seriously scald the driver. Finally, the Stanley Steamer’s water tank had to be refilled every 3050 miles (4880 km), but the company felt drivers could refill their water tanks at any brook, pond, or horse trough.So as the proud owner of 1904 and a 1912 Stanleys, I will tell you the progress in steam technology is almost as obvious as that of internal combustion engines of the same era. And in the era, you didn’t start steam cars from cold everyday, you left the pilot light burning overnight or while stopped. And you rarely blew off the boiler. Great advances were being made very year, and comparisons to a 1902 Stanley should be done with a car from 1902. If you ever want to see proof of how far ahead steam cars were then, just watch London to Brighton. Or read about how steam cars had to be banned from the Vanderbilt Cup Race.

***Edit to add: Steamers in 1902 typically did not have condensers, I am unaware of any steam car from that vintage with one.

This is somewhere between excessively harsh and just plain wrong on the Stanley Steamer.

Later steamers used oil-fired flash boilers that could produce enough steam to get moving within seconds of firing upif you ever drove a diesel car with glow plugs (back in the 80s) the experience would be not unfamiliar. (Turn key, wait for "glow plugs warming" light to go out, then hit the starter motor …)

And the steamers had a couple of huge advantages over early gas/diesel vehicles. They had no gearboxjust a simple reversermaking them mechanically simpler, and produced immense low-end torque. They eren’t slow, either, and for a number of years held the automobile land speed record. Steam persisted in heavy trucks for some time after it became unpopular for cars for precisely that reason. (As for why it went out of favour with cars: you needed to load water as well as fuel oil, and there was a secondary problem of oil leaking into the steam side of the circuit, necessitating a tear-down and deep clean of the flash boiler.)Thank you for this.
Jay Leno has a couple of videos featuring his collection of steam-powered cars like the 1922 Stanley, but also the 1925 Doble E Series. That one used superheated steam and could be warmed up enough to go in 2 minutes after starting.

While everyone likes to quote Jay Leno’s Doble’s, these were practically one off, highly engineered super cars. Very few made, even fewer used to any significant degree (do not get me wrong, marvels of engineering and very cool cars). What people should be pointing out are White steam cars with flash boilers, under ten minutes to get running and an order of magnitude more efficient than Stanley’s (they used condensers, looked like radiators, to recycle steam exhaust). October 4, 2023 at 1:25 pm Channel Ars Technica ← Previous story Next story → Related Stories Today on Ars