When I was younger, I had a T-top Camaro. This was a whole different animal. The tops were heavy, taking them off and putting them on was a pain in the ass, they took up the whole damn trunk (not that a Camaro has much of one, admittedly) when stowed, they started leaking about half an hour after we took delivery, it was drafty and cold, and there was the ever-present terror that you’d manage to very expensively break one while putting them on or taking them off (though, fortunately, I never did). To add insult to injury, it didn’t really feel much different with them off. Oh, sure, you had the open space where the bit you’d normally hit your head on getting into the car should’ve been, and that was nice, but on the road it was just noisier. With the same view through the rearview mirror either way, there just wasn’t any particular feeling of… liberation.

Put simply, the convertible is worth it; the T-top wasn’t.

Through all that time, though, I never had a car with a moonroof. I didn’t even know anyone whose car had a moonroof for most of that time. (I should, perhaps, explain that by “moonroof” I mean a panel in the roof that opens, so that you could, if pressed, use it as an emergency exit. This is as opposed to a sunroof, which is just a fixed transparent panel in the roof that maybe pops up a little for ventilation, maybe does nothing at all.) I’d seen them, of course, but I never really saw the point. It looked, for all intents and purposes, like a replay of the T-top experience, except you traded the convenience of not having to lug the thing to the trunk for the downside that you still had the bit of the car you’d hit your head on. Just something to be drafty, and leak when it rained.

I thought that right up until a couple of weeks ago, when my mother bought a MINI Cooper, and, while driving it around, I suddenly realized that it’s not the T-top experience, and it’s nothing to compare to a convertible either. The moonroof thing is… somewhere in the middle. It’s a little like the convertible in that all you have to do is push a button, and a little like the T-top in that you don’t get that full-on open-top experience. Of the two, it’s much closer to the T-top experience, but the downsides are so much less with a moonroof, it’s hard to believe.

As a ragtop snob, I was completely prepared to find the MINI’s moonroof pointless, but I just can’t. Sure, you’re sacrificing an inch or two of headroom, and the MINI’s popup air dams make an irritating rattling noise if you don’t find the friction points and damp them, but it doesn’t leak, it doesn’t let in a draft, and here’s something else it shares with my convertible: it’s got nice features even when it’s closed. It’s glass, so you can see through it, but it’s nicely tinted, so you don’t roast in the sun. It’s surprising what a difference that makes to the atmosphere inside the car. (The old Camaro’s T-tops were glass too, but they were laid out such that you couldn’t see anything through them from a normal driving position.)

There’s even one thing the MINI’s moonroof can do that – if I’m being honest – I have to admit my beloved convertible can’t.

I live in a town with two traffic lights, both of them on the main drag through town. This is a route that big trucks with full loads of logs often take, and over the years, as yahoo truckers with bigger and bigger overloads have made the run and bashed the lights, the town has jacked them up higher and higher – to the point where, if you’re driving a normal-size car and you stop where the painted line on the street tells you to, you can’t see the lights without doing some very interesting contortions.

Unless it’s a nice sunny day and you have the top down… or you’re in my mom’s MINI. Then, even if it’s raining, you just look up through the moonroof, and there you are. It’s difficult to encapsulate the delight you feel when you first notice that little trick.

At this point, I’m prepared to say that the only real downside to the moonroof on a MINI is that, if you’ve got one, you can’t get the Union Jack roof graphic.

But let’s say, for the sake of argument, that piston engines have reached the limit of what can be wrung out of them. That what’s really needed now is a whole new concept in automotive powerplant technology, something that will make cars with piston engines seem as antiquated and quaint as fighter planes with propellers.

Well, funnily enough, I think that something already exists. In fact, I think it’s the same something that left propeller-driven fighter planes behind at the end of World War II… and it’s a something that engineers first seriously took a crack at putting in automobiles in the early 1960s.

Meet the 1963 Chrysler Turbine. Styled by Ghia, the famed Italian design firm (of VW Karmann Ghia fame), it wasn’t called the Turbine just because it looked futuristic and sleek by the standards of its day. It was called that because it really was powered by a turbine. Understand, though, the Turbine was not a “jet car”. Its turbine didn’t power it by direct thrust, as in those giant dragsters with the jet fighter engines, or various Batmobiles over the years. It used a gas turbine where a conventional car has a piston engine – to drive a pair of its wheels via a mechanical gearing system. It wasn’t intended for stunts or silly afterburner showing off; it was intended to prove that a gas turbine engine was a serious candidate to replace the piston engine under the hood of the average American car.

Chrysler Corporation had been fooling around with small gas turbine engines since before the Second World War, and they’d made attempts at putting them into cars before, but their earlier attempts were, quite frankly, rubbish. The biggest problem they had was the same problem that plagued the early jet aircraft: poor throttle response. A lot of modern turbocharged cars experience a phenomenon called “turbo lag”, wherein you stamp on the throttle, but the big boost of horsepower provided by the turbo doesn’t kick in for several seconds while it sorts out what it’s doing. Chrysler’s early experimental turbine-powered cars had a very similar problem, except that in their case, the wait wasn’t just for the added horsepower provided by a turbo, it was for any power at all.

In the 1963 Turbine Car they had that issue pretty well licked, as well as the other major bugaboos of their early turbine experiments – mechanical reliability and fuel efficiency. Chrysler built 55 ’63 Turbine Cars and sent them all over the country in an ambitious test program, placing them with ordinary people in all walks of life for testing in the real world – where they promptly performed brilliantly, racking up a reliability record that would have been the envy of any normal car of their day. They ran everywhere, rain or shine, winter and summer, day and night – and, most intriguingly from our modern oh-no-is-this-peak-oil perspective, they ran on pretty much anything that was a) a liquid and b) flammable. Gasoline, diesel oil, kerosene, jet fuel, Wesson, they didn’t care. The president of Mexico, presented with one for his consideration, famously tried running it on tequila, which it happily did (though presumably it didn’t eat the worm). And all that with an emission signature that amounted to little more than some heat.

The Turbine test program ran for three years. More than 200 people spent three months each driving their Turbines in normal, everyday life, just like their next-door neighbors were using their Chevy Impalas and Ford Galaxie 500s. From Maine to California, in the hands of postmen, housewives, salesmen, engineers, doctors, ministers, the Turbines whirred steadily on. And all during that time, shopping mall displays and other marketing events announced that here, my friends, was the car of the future. Never mind the concept stuff on display at Autorama. We built these and then proved that they actually work in the real world.

And then…

… well, and then nothing, sadly. Chrysler did go on to make one further turbine-powered ground vehicle – the M1 Abrams tank, you may have heard of it – but nothing more was said, in public anyway, about a turbine-powered automobile for the general public.

Why not? Well… here it all gets a little hazy. Chrysler collected the ’63 Turbines at the end of the test and destroyed all but a handful of them, ostensibly because if they didn’t they would have to pay an import duty on the bits made in Italy, and what little the company’s management said about the turbine idea when people asked about it afterward was couched in vague terms about economic feasibility. There were mutterings about the problem of training mechanics to work on the things and were Mr. and Mrs. John Q. and Jane Public really ready for such a thing (ironic, given Chrysler had just spent three years proving that they were). Even more interestingly, when Chrysler was bailed out by the federal government during the Iacocca years, one of the provisions of that bailout was that Chrysler would scrap any and all research into turbine-powered consumer automobiles.

As you might imagine, these… intriguing… circumstances give rise to a good many conspiracy theories among those who remember the ’63 Turbine and wonder what might have been.

Mind you, as cars they did have shortcomings. Their exhaust temperature at the pipe, for instance, was a rather brisk 500° F, and they made an uninspiring vacuum-cleaner whine in an era when people expected a car that size to make a meaty V-8 rumble. They didn’t have inspiring power by the standards of the day – around 130 horsepower, at a time when a standard family car with a V-8 engine developing less than 300 HP was considered a bit poky. While they didn’t produce carbon monoxide or unburned hydrocarbons in their exhaust, they did produce oxides of nitrogen – though the engineers had fixed that by 1966. And yes, they required a bit of special handling – if you didn’t follow the startup procedure correctly, for instance, you’d destroy the engine.

Still, that was nothing normal, workaday people couldn’t handle. Nowadays you expend more brainpower working out how the radio in your new car is operated vs. the one in your old car. Everything else could’ve been cracked with further engineering (and, as I’ve already mentioned, the emissions issue already had been). The trickiest shortcoming of the bunch would’ve been making it make a better noise, and conventional car companies nowadays have entire teams of engineers working on that kind of thing.

What the 1963 Chrysler Turbine represents, then, is a car built with technology that arguably wasn’t quite there… but the mass of evidence from the three-year test program shows that at worst, it was within one generation of commercial readiness. Had research continued, had the program been given anything like the attention it deserved, all the ’63 Turbine’s remaining problems could have been addressed. Look at how much conventional cars have advanced since 1963. Consider a modern turbine car as far ahead of the ’63 Turbine, engineering-wise, as a modern Chrysler 300C is ahead of a ’63 300J.

Consider it, versus the alternatives we have today instead – versus pointless publicity stunts like the Prius and naff plastic boxes like the Smart Fortwo – and weep.

The only problem with this, as anyone else who was there at the time can attest to, is that in the early 1970s American small cars were rubbish. That said, Dad was also not a Ford man, so at least we escaped having the worst small car ever made. Instead we had a Chevy Vega. An orange one, no less, which was fortuitous in that the rust it would inevitably develop wouldn’t show as obviously. I have only the dimmest memories of the Vega – it only lasted until I was about three – but I recall thinking it was cramped inside even then.

Fast-forward to 1976; the ’73 fuel crisis had mostly abated and happy days were here again. The Vega had pretty much rusted out anyway, and it was okay to have a big car again – so my father, overcome with glee, threw caution to the wind and ordered a brand new, fully customized Monte Carlo from our local Chevrolet dealer. It took months to come, and when it did, well. The 1977 Monte Carlo wasn’t just big, it was colossal – and at the time it was considered a mid-sized car! It had a hood you could land military jets on and four-foot-long doors that weighed about 100 pounds apiece. The front seats swiveled so you could get in and out without all of that pesky sliding-across-the-seat stuff you have to do in normal cars. It was the swankiest car Chevrolet made that year.

It got about 10 miles per gallon.

This became something of an issue in 1979, when the Iranian Revolution sparked the second major U.S. fuel crisis.

Probably not coincidentally, it was around this time that cars powered by things other than gasoline started to become vaguely worthy of the average consumer’s attention. “By the year 2000, $BIGPERCENTAGE of cars on America’s roads will be electrically powered” became the same kind of car-magazine mantra that “by the year 2000, cars will fly” had been in the middle of the century. There were a lot of pie-in-the-sky announcements of forthcoming new products and promises of wonderful things in the future.

Then the price of crude started to come down again and everybody more or less forgot about it, except for a few hippies and other ahead-of-their-time enviro-nuts. Electric cars went back to being inconvenient curiosities that weren’t really good for anything. The most the mainstream did at the time was to start looking more closely at diesel-powered cars, because – weird as this is to consider now – at the time, diesel fuel was considerably cheaper than gasoline, even when oil prices spiked. That was clearly an evolutionary dead end, especially when considered environmentally rather than economically.

Over the last 20 years or so there has still been the occasional spasm of searching for alternatives (oddly, they seem to coincide eerily with Middle East wars), but they always peter out again. The Alewife station on the Boston T’s Red Line had a rank of spaces with chargers for electric cars in the parking garage, right up by the entrance to the station, for years. I think I saw an actual electric car parked in one of them once. Last time I was in the station, the chargers appeared to have been removed. And yes, you do see the odd city bus or UPS delivery vehicle with a decal on the side proudly announcing that this vehicle runs on used fryolator oil or grass clippings or something, and that’s fine. It’s not as if a city bus could do anything with the power to go faster than a reasonably healthy man can walk anyway. Apart from that, though, it’s pretty much been business as usual.

Well, here we are in the first decade of the 21st century, and everything’s gone wrong again. Not only is gasoline ridiculously expensive by U.S. standards (which, since I live there, are the only standards I consider personally relevant), but now the green lobby has acquired such social, if not political, power that people who drive real cars get the same kinds of evil looks on the street that you’d once have had to do something really outrageous to get. Walking around in a full-length coat made of veal, say.

Admittedly, that kind of crackpottery isn’t new – I once, in about 1992, had a patchouli enthusiast come up to me at a gas station while I was filling up my 1968 Pontiac Tempest and inform me that I was “no better than a murderer” and that he hoped I was proud of myself. The temptation to pull the nozzle out of the car, douse him with premium unleaded, and strike a match was very, very strong. It seems to be more prevalent now, though. You get the same kind of feedback for driving small, reasonably economical cars like the one I have now, a Saab 900S convertible, and from people who you would swear are habitual bathers.

It is, distressingly, starting to look more and more like proper motor vehicles will eventually be forced out, turning the world into some hideous motoring dystopia, like in that old Rush song about the guy with the Ferrari 166. I’m not going to do the usual gearhead thing here and try to trot out obviously forced rationalizations about why piston-engined cars are practically necessary or the like. Yes, electric cars are still ridiculous. Yes, they don’t have a long enough range, high enough reliability, or low enough cost to be worth bothering with. Yes, most of those on the market right now are either insanely unsafe, utterly impractical, or both. Even the best of the current crop of electric cars that I know about, the Tesla Roadster, is hugely expensive, has only a 200-mile range, and takes three and a half hours to recharge. I live in the far reaches of Maine. They’re never going to sell me an electric car, unless I have no choice in the matter at all, before they can make one that will get me to Boston and doesn’t take a full viewing of Seven Samurai to “fill up”.

But that’s just it: Eventually, I’m sure they will. Everything I’ve said about electric cars above was also true of early motorcars, and all those problems were eventually surpassed. If engineers keep working on electric cars, they’ll one day achieve the same sort of evolution, and the electric vehicle will have arrived. Maybe the answer is fuel cells, I don’t know. I’m not sanguine about driving around with a charge of somehing so enormously more explosive than gasoline as hydrogen on board, but don’t go by me.

I’ll be sad when that day comes, anyway, for no better reason than that I like internal combustion cars. I like changing gears and keeping track of revs, even though in practical terms that’s just a contrivance for overcoming the piston engine’s main limitation, its inability to provide smooth or consistent power across a street car’s wide range of speed requirements. I like torque and horsepower ratings. I like the noise they make and the idea that, even if I’m never going to have any reason to ask it to, my car could go really fast. (Well, okay, the car I actually drive couldn’t go really fast, but it could still go quite a lot faster than I ever drive it.)

Yes, in strictly practical terms, I agree that there is nothing I require of a motor vehicle that some future electric model will be unable to do… but I can’t accept that we’ve climbed our way to the 21st century just to start accepting things that can only do what we need them to do. And I decline to just sit back and be demonized because I like cars that rev and make a bit of smoke. Technological progress is supposed to be about a steadily increasing standard of living, not more effective austerity measures.