Henry Ford's HempMobile!
Forget about electric vehicles! Hemp was used in making Henry Ford's HempMobile, which was 10x stronger than steel and 100x greener!
Henry Ford had envisioned and developed an automobile made from Cannabis-derived hemp long before the swarm of electric cars that we see at auto shows today. It might also run on hemp oil. Is this the world's greenest vehicle? You are the one to inform us!
Welcome to 2018, it might have taken the better part of a century but the world has finally decided that it is time to leave the internal combustion engine behind, so as to, save the environment.
You know, Polar Bear, Ice-Caps, global warming and the sorts. This is far from the first time this question has been raised, in fact, as it would turn out, the father of the modern Automobile had the same thought.
In the 1930s Henry Ford questioned the long-term sustainability of cars made from steel that ran on gasoline. He began work on alternatives, his research found him toying with the idea of making cars from hemp. An industry that was just coming into existence in the US at the time.
In 1941, Henry Ford unveiled his ultimate product with the potential to change the environment, an automobile constructed completely of hemp that could operate on hemp fuel as well as vegetable oil, following twelve years of rigorous research. The automobile panels were made using a mixture that included 70% cellulose fibres from wheat straw, hemp, and sisal, as well as 30% resin binder, and were moulded under 1,500-pound psi hydraulic pressure. The tubular welded frame of the car was the only steel in the entire body. The body was ten times as robust as steel. Henry Ford was so confident in the panel's strength that he hacked up the display car with an axe. The axe, which would have slashed any steel panel, rebounded back.
Rudolf Diesel, The inventor of the diesel engine, was also involved in the development. For the 'Plastic' Car, he created an engine that ran on vegetable and seed oils like hemp. Ford famously said, "There's enough alcohol in one year's harvest of an acre of potatoes to drive the machinery necessary to farm the fields for a hundred years."
Unfortunately, the powers that be at the time included the tremendously strong and wealthy petroleum industry, which lobbied hard to maintain high alcohol taxes while lowering gasoline prices. This even “coincided” with the prohibition of alcohol and hemp in the 1920s.
A final resting place for a project that mainly relied on hemp! Could this automobile have truly changed the world for Henry Ford? It seemed to have everything it needed to accomplish the job, but I guess we'll never know!
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