In April 1954 Fiat’s famous Lingotto rooftop track echoed to a new sound – a jet wail that came from Fiat’s new gas turbine experiment. After joking that he should maybe wear a parachute, veteran test driver Carlo Salomano took the machine gently round the banked oval.
A few days later, the car reappeared at Turin’s Caselle Airport for some high-speed runs, and also put some laps at Monza and Castel Furano before the Rome Grand Prix. Its potential top speed probably exceeded 200mph, though this was never established, and Fiat engineers, like their rivals at Rover and Chrysler, were realizing that the gas turbine gave extremely poor fuel economy in passenger cars. Turbina had its greatest success at the 1954 Turin Motor Show where the futuristic lines attracted enormous interest. Today it is in the city’s motor museum.
The Turbina was a bid to investigate the new gas turbine for road vehicles, but also to proclaim Fiat’s re-emergence as a technological force after the war years. Whereas in the UK Rover buried its experimental turbine in a modified body shell from a near-standard ‘Aunty’ model, Fiat let rip with wonderful Buck Rogers styling conceived by visionary engineer Luigi Fabio Rapi (1902–1977) and realized by the incomparable craft skills of Turin’s metalworkers. It was everything a wild leap of imagination should be and proved that Futurism was not dead. Who cares that it scarcely turned a wheel? Even today it still perfectly fulfils its destiny to be a jet car.
Handmade in Fiat’s experimental shop, the Turbina drew on contemporary sci-fi iconography and promised a future that has never arrived.