The Australian-designed car built to steamroll the establishment
While Australia’s most promising steam-powered car program never made it to market, the engineering was world-class.
You could be forgiven for not knowing of The Pritchard, an obscure, yet ambitious automotive marque founded by a Melbourne-based engineer, who’d go on to have his ‘steamer’ air freighted to Detroit to show it to the ‘big boys’.
Mad about steam engines from an early age when he and his father used to build them for fun, Edward ‘Ted’ Pritchard was a well-credentialed mechanical engineer and visionary.
A Fellow of Melbourne’s Technical College (now the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology) and a member of the Institute of Engineers Australia, he believed that steam could power anything and do so economically. To prove his beliefs, he set about commercialising a steam power unit for use in everything from the agricultural to automotive sectors.
A labour of love for Ted and his father, the self-named, designed and engineered Pritchard Steam Power System was, in essence, a steam crate motor that could be retrofitted, or engineered from the outset as a primary power source for any machine requiring motive force.
To demonstrate the flexibility, compact size, and practicality of the steamer, Ted decided to fit it to a 1963 XM Ford Falcon.
Over four years, Pritchard refined the drivetrain and packaging to suit the Falcon, with the final steamer featuring a 288cc, 90-degree, V-twin which developed approximately 40 horsepower and a mighty 360Nm of torque, with peak revs reached at 4,000rpm.
This was enough to return a fuel efficiency of 9.4 litres per 100km. Compare that for a moment to the standard six-cylinder XM – which would consume close to 15 litres of fuel per 100km – and you start to understand why the Pritchard had potential.
The Pritchard also had fewer moving parts, could run on any type of combustible fuel from cooking oil to kerosene, and weighed less than its combustion-powered contemporary.
Most interesting was the fact that the car did not need a transmission as the engine could be thrown into reverse at the flick of the column-mounted shifter for immediate ‘reverse-torque,’ or as Ted called it an additional ‘safety device.’ The car was also self-starting, featured a closed-loop boiler, made use of the standard Falcon radiator as a condenser and could cruise at 120km/h.
By 1967, Ted and his ‘Green Stripe’ XM – named for the green centre stripe Pritchard fitted to the vehicle – were ready to undertake proof on concept and field trials. Conducted around Melbourne, Pritchard’s field trials were described as ‘convincing’ by the media of the time. So widespread was the interest in the ‘steam-powered car’ that several News networks covered the vehicle trial at the time.
Buoyed by enthusiasm from the successful trials, Ted refined his offering and by 1971 his ‘Green Stripe’ had attracted the attention of US auto manufacturers, who undertook extensive local testing in Australia.
So impressed were the Americans, that in November of 1972, the car and its inventor set off for the United States. Landing in L.A., the company embarked on 24 demonstrations over three weeks to the likes of Ford, General Motors, American Motors and a host of other interested parties, with all leaving the events impressed according to the inventor.
Upon return to Australia, Ted was made aware that ‘Green Stripe’ was the cleanest vehicle ever evaluated by far, already surpassing the incoming 1975 US Emissions Regulations.
These forthcoming emissions standards, which we now know as Corporate Average Fuel Economy (CAFE) regulations, would see a slew of new emissions measures thrust onto American manufacturers – including Exhaust Gas Recirculation, recognition of NOx emissions and the adoption of catalytic converters. Pair this with the oil shock of 1973 and automakers moved quickly to clean up their act, in turn stifling interest in Pritchard’s work.
Undeterred, Ted continued to refine his drivetrain and by 1974, interest had reignited in Pritchard’s work, with Ted presenting the vehicle for further testing at Ford’s Geelong testing facility.
At first, Ford’s engineers thought their testing equipment was mis-calibrated, so they reset the equipment, but the result was the same. Pritchard’s drivetrain was able to meet emissions regulations that we would not see until 1999 – known as Euro 2 – but Ford passed on the tech once again.
It was by this time that media interest was again piqued, and the engineer-come-advocate appeared on the iconic Australian TV series Leyland Brothers World (if you don’t know who they are, just Ask the Leyland Brothers) this time with the Falcon sans the green stripe. It is during this interview with Mal Leyland is told of a second-generation Pritchard steamer that is under development.
That second vehicle was first shown to the public at the 1975 Melbourne International Auto Show as a model (below), debuting as the Advanced Pritchard Steam Car. So compelling was the proposition that the then Federal Minister for Manufacturing and Industry awarded a grant to Pritchard to build three prototypes.
Based on a ‘restyled’ Holden Torana donor vehicle, progress on the prototypes was slow and funds began to run out.
To keep the program alive, Ted sold one of the original steam trucks he and his father worked on in the early days, but it was not enough.
Fortunately, in July of 1977, State and Federal Governments injected further funds into the company just as it was on its knees. This cash lifeline was enough to finish the prototype drivetrains and get them to the bench testing phase, but again the program began to run behind schedule and was bleeding cash.
In short, by 1981 the company went broke and despite growing international interest in the powertrain, for both motive and stationary purposes, the company just didn’t have the means to finish its development work. But Ted wasn’t about to give up on his dream and passion.
Finding work as a Lecturer at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) Ted taught the finer points of engineering and thermodynamics by day, and whiled away at his drawing desk by night investing five years and 6000 hours into his new S5000 steam engine – named so because of its ability to generate 5000 Watts of power.
Between 1992 and 2002 Ted Pritchard remained committed to his cause, lobbying governments and publishing articles on the advantages of steam power.
By 2003, Pritchard Power Australia had been formed to further develop and license the S5000 power unit, but it was never to be. In 2006, with Ted now 77 years old, he signed the technology over to an Australian company that embarked on commercialising the engine, but he died before it was finished.
Today, Pritchard’s S5000 lives on via the Victorian-based company Uniflow Power which has developed the steamer into a consumable product dubbed the ‘Cobbler’. Able to produce electricity, steam, hot water, distilled water and rotary mechanical power, the Cobbler is everything Ted Pritchard envisioned his powerplant could be.
No one knows what happened to the original Pritchard truck, Ford Falcon, or ‘restyled’ Torana, but Ted and his vehicles certainly left an impression on the automotive establishment and for a moment in time was a company that steamed ahead while the others ran out of puff.
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