The fabulous 1963 Chrysler Turbine Ghia had an equally glamorous sibling: the Typhoon, a two-seat roadster with a disappearing metal top.
Chrysler’s stunning Turbine Ghia, produced in 55 copies and tested by more than 200 households across America in 1964-66, is easily the company’s most famous concept car. However, at the same time there was a lesser-known sibling called the Typhoon, which featured strikingly similar styling but remarkably different packaging. While the Turbine Ghia was a two-door hardtop with seating for a family of four, the Typhoon was a sporty two-place roadster with a hideaway folding steel top.
Both the Typhoon and the Turbine Ghia were styled, of course, by Charles Mashigan under the direction of Elwood Engel, Chrysler’s newly recruited chief of styling. Sources report that the Typhoon came along first; meanwhile, the styling of the two cars is of a piece and they co-existed in the same program in the same timeframe, their identities somewhat intertwined. When the first of the 55 Turbine Ghia hardtop bodies was delivered from Italy to Detroit and uncrated in January of 1963, it was wearing Typhoon emblems on both rear quarter panels.
There was one more noteworthy difference between the Turbine Ghia hardtop and the Typhoon sports car: The Typhoon was designed so that the Chrysler A831 fourth-gen gas turbine engine could be installed in the front or the rear of the chassis. However, the sole example built was essentially a studio model with no engine or drivetrain, so it never ran under its own power. The Typhoon was last seen in public in a presentation at the 1964/65 World’s Fair in New York City, where it was repainted a brilliant metallic silver.
How fast does it go?
Never the Typhoon existed. Never saw it before.
Thanks for posting this. I had never heard of or seen a picture of the Typhoon
It is interesting to compare the styling of the Chrysler Turbine cars with the 1958-60 four-seater Ford Thunderbirds (the “Squarebirds”). Both Elwood Engel, Chrysler’s vice president of design, and Charles Mashigan, who was responsible for the design of the Typhoon, had both come over to Chrysler from Ford.
Charles Mashigan later worked at AMC in their advanced styling studio and the original 1965 AMX concept was developed under his leadership. In my opinion the AMX concept, as well as the later AMX production models, exhibit similar styling cues to the Chrysler Typhoon. This is particularly noticeable in the forward slant of the roof sail panels, the crisp body lines, and the overall profile of both cars.