A builder known as Macona fitted a surplus Solar T-62 jet turbine into a sand rail frame, paired it with Kia/Hyundai HSG water-cooled motor-generators acting as an APU, and drove the wheels through a Mitsubishi Outlander electric motor. The result is a series hybrid that puts 150 shaft horsepower through the drivetrain, more than any air-cooled VW boxer ever managed, at a total system weight that likely matches the engine and transmission it replaced.
The T-62 burns 19.3 gallons of jet fuel per hour at full load. Nobody is saving money here. The 53-page forum thread documenting the build is where the real value is: the turbine arrived bare surplus, the APU conversion using off-shelf hybrid motor-generators is the engineering pivot that makes everything else possible, and the weight math justifying the Outlander motor swap is worked through in detail worth reading.
The sand rail is not yet street legal, but Macona is working on it. The series hybrid architecture itself is not a curiosity: Edison Motors of Canada is applying the same principle to semi trucks and heavy trucks, explicitly for fuel efficiency at scale. The gap between a jet-powered sand rail and a commercial freight application is smaller than it sounds.
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