Unusual fact in the history of the automobile, Henry Ford, creator of the Model T Ford (1908-1927), was a fervent advocate of the production and fueling of cars entirely with plant material.
In 1925, Ford told the New York Times, “The fuel of the future is going to come from fruits like that sumach by the roadside, or apples, weeds, sawdust—almost everything. There is fuel in every bit of plant matter that can be fermented. There is enough alcohol in the yield of an acre of potatoes to run the machinery that will keep the fields going for a hundred years.” Then in 1933, he made another case for annual plants like hemp. He said, “Why cut down forests that have taken centuries to grow and exhaust mines that have taken an infinite number of years to build, when you can produce the equivalent of all these forest and mining products every year from crops that grow back every year?”
On August 13, 1941, Henry Ford took action by presenting at the Dearborn days in Dearborn, Michigan USA where the Ford manufacturing plants were located (it was also presented at the Michigan State Fair Grounds the same year), the prototype Soybean car, a car developed under the leadership of Lowell Overly with the help of scientist and botanist George Washington Carver, a man born under slavery who rose to such prodigious levels of achievement that Time magazine labeled the man, the "Black Leonardo". from renewable resources combined with innovative technology.
A year later, in January 1942, the patent was approved for the entire project.
The car's body was made of composite materials made of hemp, soybeans, straw and sisal, impregnated with phenoplast and formaldehyde (a technique relatively similar to the Duroplast panels of the East German Trabant 601, but with cotton fibers). More is not known because the formulation was never revealed and is now believed to have disappeared. It is known, however, that the body is made of fourteen one-inch-thick plastic panels and Plexiglas windows, attached to a tubular steel frame and weighed 1,900 pounds (862 kg), a weight reduction of about 25% or 1,000 pounds less than a steel car. The prototype is powered by a 2.2-liter, 60-hp V8 gasoline engine.
Hemp is a cultivated annual plant, selected for its stem size and low content of THC or other cannabinoids from the species that botanists call Cultivated Hemp (Cannabis sativa L.).
Eco-friendly, hemp bioplastic has the main advantage of being biodegradable after 6 months, unlike traditional plastic, which takes centuries to decompose. Edible, hemp plastic however has a strong psychoactive and hallucinogenic effect, which is why hemp has been banned in many countries.
There were several reasons why Henry Ford wanted to build this car:
He was looking for a project that would combine the fruits of industry with agriculture.
He also claimed that the plastic panels made the car safer than traditional steel cars; and that the car could even roll over without being crushed.
Another reason was due to a shortage of metal at the time. Henry hoped that his new plastic material could replace the traditional metals used in cars.
Ford and Boyer next to the finished prototype
Soybean because next to its place of manufacture
Ford’s bioplastic model was made from hemp, flax, wheat and spruce pulp, making the car lighter than fiberglass and ten times stronger than steel, The New York Times wrote on February 2, 1941. The car ran on ethanol made from hemp or other agricultural waste. Ford’s experimental model was seen as a step toward realizing his dream of “growing automobiles out of the ground,” Popular Mechanics wrote in its December 1941 issue, and reducing greenhouse gases.
Hemp is ideal for pyrolytic conversion to chemical feedstocks, transportation fuels, electricity and heat for industrial purposes.
Henry Ford sitting next to his hemp field
Hemp cultivation in the United States was essentially banned in 1937 due to its association with its THC-containing cousin – in truth, it was banned through the efforts of bully lobbyists representing powerful industries such as the oil, plastics (Dupont), and paper industries.
Ford continued to grow hemp illegally for a few years after the federal ban, hoping to become independent of the oil industry. But, Ford eventually found it impractical to mass-produce vehicles that relied on a steady supply of hemp.
He proclaimed that he would "grow automobiles from the ground" - but that never happened, even though he had more than 12,000 acres (4,900 ha) of soybeans to experiment with.
Ford and Boyer in discussion
Due to the collapse of the American automobile industry during World War II, Ford's dream car never saw mass production. A second unit was in production when the war broke out, but the project was abandoned and forgotten as the Ford Soybean was destroyed and never returned to the drawing boards in Dearborn.
Alas, because this smoking idea would have made environmentalists dream,
and give nightmares to Americans who love big engines.
Today, however, you can find BMWs, Mercedes-Benzes and Bugattis with door panels and dashboards made from hemp fibers... Life is Good®
Investor Bruce Dietzen has also created a prototype of Ford’s hemp car. Given that the carbon footprint of manufacturing a standard car is 10 tons, hemp can sequester enough carbon to at least make the car carbon neutral, if not carbon negative, Dietzen says.
The Hemp Farming Act passed in December 2018 legalized hemp production in the United States. With this law, Ford and Dietzen’s prototypes could further contribute to eradicating the fossil fuel-based automobile industry and making transportation sustainable.
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