SIA Flashback – Calvair: GM’s Stirling Effort

Stirling engines, while hypothetically awesome, have never really caught on as automotive powerplants, largely because they make much less power than a typical gasoline engine and weigh so much more. It’s something NASA found out with its experimental Stirling engine program, and as we see from Michael Lamm’s article for SIA #168, November 1998, it’s something GM previously found out with its Calvair – a 1964 Corvair powered by a single-cylinder Stirling engine.