CARS DRIVEN BY GAS

Southland Times, Issue 23676, 26 November 1938, Page 18

CARS DRIVEN BY GAS

SOVIET INDUSTRY’S t NEW PLAN LARGE-SCALE PRODUCTION ANNOUNCED Tens of -thousands of “gas-generator” passenger motor-cars, lorries, and tractors will be rolling, across the broad face of Russia within a year, according to the latest plans of the Soviet motorcar industry. Wide publicity was recently given here to a two-months’ trial run of “gasgenerated” lorries, writes the Moscow correspondent of The Observer. Twelve machines operating on wood and charcoal, instead of petrol, travelled more than 7500 miles over a circular route extending from Moscow to Omsk,' in Siberia, and back. It is claimed that despite difficult road conditions —part of the route lay through swamps and part through sandy deserts —not one of the machines met with a mishap. The average speed over dirt roads was between 15 and 20 miles an hour. On macadam roads speeds of 40 miles an hour were attained.

The principle of gas-generating consists in adapting internal combustion engines to run on gas derived from solid fuel by the installation of a special gas-generating unit. Gas generating has been widely developed in Germany and Japan as a means of reducing costly imports of oil. . . Its adoption in the Soviet Union, a country with vast oil deposits, appears at first sight economically unwarranted. The Soveit authorities, however, are prompted by highly practical considerations in their promotion of gas-gener-ating. The Soviet oilfields are mainly in the southern Caucasus, and are remote from the vast regions of the Soviet interior. Liquid fuel has to be transported hundreds and thousands of miles by rail or water. Gas-generating motor vehicles, on the other hand, operating on solid fuel, can be used in regions that are far from the nearest railway. At the same time a huge saving in oil can be effected by adapting the motor traffic to solid fuel in regions where timber, coal and peat are plentiful. The Soviet Research Institute of the motor-car industry has designed a series of gas-generating installations for lorries and tractors. The experimental work had reached the stage where models approved by a Government commission have been placed in mass production at the major motor-car and tractor plants. According to the lates figures, in 1939, 16,000 gas-generating lorries and 900 gas-generating tractors will be turned out; the corresponding figures for 1940 are fixed at 40,000 and 15,000 respectively. Projects have been completed to adapt passenger cars of standard Soviet make to gas-generating.