On August 13, 1941, as World War II rocked Europe, the United States still had the opportunity to distract itself with traditional summer festivities. To the Dearborn Daysthe festival of the city where the automotive giant Ford is based, made its appearance among the stands and food stalls a strange car, led by Henry Ford himself. The car, which had a “consistent” shape with the models of those years, was however surprisingly innovative in the type of construction.
A body made up of 14 plastic panels was applied on top of a metal tube frame, a team led by Lowell E. Overly (to whom the project had been transferred after the failure of Eugene Turenne Gregorie, head of the design department). reinforced, with the use of 10% of hemp fibers.
Named then “Soybean Car” (the soy car) but survived in popular memories as “Hemp Car”(The cannabis car), this experimental car responded to a precise strategy, espoused and vigorously conducted by Henry Fordthat is unite industry and agriculture in common projects that allowed to recover waste or low-cost products, using them instead of steel and also allowing for lighter and more resistant constructions. It was also conceived as a response to the shortage of steeldue to the rationing brought as a dowry by the world conflict
The Soybean Laboratory in Greenfield Village (now home to the Ford Museum) had built this futuristic car, which availed itself of the precious advice of the botanist and chemist George Washington Carver. It was he, thanks to his work at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama (funded by Ford himself) who had formulated the composition of the material of plant origin with which the 14 panels were built: 50% fiber from Pinus Elliottii (a conifer widespread in the southeast of the country), 30% straw, 10% ramie (vegetable fiber used for thousands of years in the East and used by the Egyptians to wrap mummies), 10% hemp. All assembled with a cellulosic resin obtained precisely from soy. It was designed to support a specific fuel, hemp ethanol, which was refined from the plant’s seeds.
The life of this prototype was very short, because the beginning of the Pacific War forced to suspend the research and, as some sources tell, the only example of the “Hemp Car” was destroyed between 1945 and 1946 by Bob Gregorie.
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