Fiat Turbina was a 1954 concept car

Concept car

A concept vehicle or show vehicle is a car made to showcase new styling and or new technology. They are often shown at motor shows to gauge customer reaction to new and radical designs which may or may not have a chance of being produced....

 built by Italian

Italy

Italy , officially the Italian Republic languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Italy's official name is as follows:;;;;;;;;), is a unitary parliamentary republic in South-Central Europe. To the north it borders France, Switzerland, Austria and...

 manufacturer Fiat

Fiat

FIAT, an acronym for Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino , is an Italian automobile manufacturer, engine manufacturer, financial, and industrial group based in Turin in the Italian region of Piedmont. Fiat was founded in 1899 by a group of investors including Giovanni Agnelli...

. It was unusual in using a gas turbine

Gas turbine

A gas turbine, also called a combustion turbine, is a type of internal combustion engine. It has an upstream rotating compressor coupled to a downstream turbine, and a combustion chamber in-between....

 for propulsion.

In 1954 Fiat was the second car manufacturer, after Rover, to introduce a car propelled by a gas turbine. The project took a long period of planning, studies began in 1948 and ended with a track test in 1954 on the track of the Lingotto

Lingotto

Lingotto is a district of Turin, Italy, that named the Lingotto building in Via Nizza, which once was a huge automobile factory, constructed by Fiat. Built from 1916 and opened in 1923, the design was unusual in that it had five floors, with raw materials going in at the ground floor, and cars...

. The engine had two compressor

Gas compressor

A gas compressor is a mechanical device that increases the pressure of a gas by reducing its volume.Compressors are similar to pumps: both increase the pressure on a fluid and both can transport the fluid through a pipe. As gases are compressible, the compressor also reduces the volume of a gas...

 stages, one turbine

Turbine

A turbine is a rotary engine that extracts energy from a fluid flow and converts it into useful work.The simplest turbines have one moving part, a rotor assembly, which is a shaft or drum with blades attached. Moving fluid acts on the blades, or the blades react to the flow, so that they move and...

 stage, power turbine was single stage with a geared reduction. The declared power was 300 hp at 22.000 rpm, and the estimated top speed was approximately 250 km/h (155.3 mph). The Turbina held the record for lowest drag coefficient

Drag coefficient

In fluid dynamics, the drag coefficient is a dimensionless quantity that is used to quantify the drag or resistance of an object in a fluid environment such as air or water. It is used in the drag equation, where a lower drag coefficient indicates the object will have less aerodynamic or...

 on an automobile (0.14) for 30 years.

The concept was shelved due to high fuel usage and problems with overheating.

The Fiat Turbina is found today in the Automobile Museum of Turin.