In the celebrity car collector community, there's Jay Leno's collection, and then there's everybody else's. The star of the Tonight Show on NBC from 1992 to 2014 spends most of his time these days tending to his vast collection of over 150 cars. With the help of his hired group of master technicians, mechanics, and bodywork guys, this group never has a shortage of rare, expensive, and iconic automobiles to wrench away on. Everything from old Deusenbergs, a Mclaren F1, antique steam and electric vehicles, and classic cars from every corner of the globe all share a roof under Leno's garage. Every vehicle in that garage has a unique and fascinating story to tell. However, one car stands head and shoulders above other cars in the collection, one so rare and so sought after, the only logical place for it to end up is in the hands of the most famous car collector possibly of all time.
Here's a look at the rarest car ever to come into Jay Leno's Garage.
There are just a few prerequisites for consideration for this title. The car must be in Jay Leno's personal collection, not just on loan, and can't have been a one-off project car. With those parameters in mind, our choice was actually simple to make.
Chryslers Jet Car
In the early 1960s, there was a sense that the world of cars was starting to change, and while it certainly was changing, it wasn't in the way many car engineers had first thought. Many ideas circulated in Detroit at the time about what the future of automobile propulsion might end up being. Some ideas were ridiculous, like the nuclear fission powered Ford Nucleon. Thankfully for oncologists everywhere, this idea never made it off the drawing board. Ford's rivals at Chrysler were also designing their own alternative engined automobile, and their design had a lot more promise. The Chrysler Turbine car, as the name would suggest, employs the use of an in-house designed A-831 gas turbine powerplant, essentially, a jet engine. Elwood Engel, Chrysler's chief of design, was given full permission to come up with a Turbine-powered rear-wheel-drive executive concept car with the expectation that the design would lead to a production model sometime in the mid to late 60s. An entire assembly line was constructed specifically to develop and manufacture this turbine car, the only time in history this was ever done. Engel delegated the task of styling the body to Italian coachbuilder Ghia, designers of the famous Volkswagen Karman-Ghia.
A One Of A Kind Powertrain
The result was a sleek, striking and all-around, revolutionary automobile that both looked and sounded like nothing else ever made. The jet turbine blades spun at over 20 thousand rpm at idle, yet the exhaust that came out the tailpipe was actually cooler and less noxious than the equivalent piston engine of the day. Once finished, the car toured the world, where it showed off its abilities to awe-struck crowds wherever it went. Because a jet engine can run on basically any combustible fuel, Chrysler demonstrated the car running on everything from liquor to French perfume. The car was also featured prominently at the 1964 worlds fair in New York. It also made an appearance in the 1964 film "The Lively Set". The car in that movie was the only one painted in a different color.
Related:5 Cars That Almost Killed Chrysler (5 That Kept It Afloat)
Boyhood Dream Becomes Reality
It was while the Turbine Car was touring the world that a young Jay Leno first became captivated by it. Unfortunately, the conservative heads at Chrysler decided it was too expensive to manufacture a jet car compared to a piston engine. They then proceeded to go scorched earth on the entire project, similar to how GM crushed the majority of their EV-1 Electric concepts over 40 years later. Of 55 total cars produced, today, Seven sit in museums, and only two in the entire world are in private hands. Leno bought one of those two in 2009, fulfilling a life long dream for the world-famous comedian and broadcaster. The car was purchased directly from Chrysler, who reserved three models in storage back in Detroit. Leno and his team of master-techs put in many hours fixing little pieces of the car like the clock back to working order. Apart from minor refurbishing of factory components, the car is pretty much exactly as it was the day it arrived in America from the designers at Ghia. With no spare parts made for these turbine engines, Leno prefers to keep acceleration to a minimum. Still, it's all worth it to keep the car in fully operational condition, according to Leno.
The list of stories surrounding any of the hundreds of vehicles in Jay Leno's collection could fill a book so long it'd make an automotive history textbook look small by comparison. But pound for pound, there's no other car in the collection that combines this level of beauty, engineering genius, and exclusivity quite in the same way the Turbine does. In a collection where truly standing takes something herculean, the Chrysler Turbine Car has just about everything else left in the dust.
Sources: JayLenosGarage, Chrysler's Turbine Car by Steve Lehto