しま🐴🌠旅

Ever heard of Ford’s Big Red? It was a gas turbine-powered semi, and it disappeared for decades. Ford rolled it out at the 1964 World’s Fair in New York, right alongside the brand new Mustang. Under the hood was a 600 horsepower gas turbine called the 705. That’s jet engine technology in a big rig, back when most trucks were making half that. And it was huge. With its double trailers, the whole rig ran 96 feet long and 13 feet tall, rated to gross 180,000 pounds. Ford said it could haul those doubles at 70 miles an hour. The cab was straight out of the Jetsons, with a suspended cab, air suspension, a flat floor, and a reclining seat for the co-driver with its own TV. After the World’s Fair, Big Red toured the country and made cross-country runs to show what it could do. But turbines were thirsty and expensive, and the idea never caught on. Big Red was the only one Ford ever built. Ford eventually let it go to Holman-Moody, its factory race team, in Charlotte, North Carolina. Then it was sold to a private buyer and vanished. For decades, nobody outside a few people knew where it was. Then in 2021, a reporter from The Drive tracked it down. It was sitting in North Carolina, restored by a private owner who’d loved it since he saw it at the World’s Fair. The original turbine was long gone, reportedly ruined after somebody started it with no oil, so he put in a later Ford turbine called the 707. Imagine pulling into a truck stop in 1964 with that thing. 🚛