Soybean car

Body drawing of the Soybean Car (1942), without plastic parts

The Soybean Car ( German  soybean car ) was a vehicle that the American automobile manufacturer Henry Ford presented to the public in 1941. 14 soy fiber reinforced body panels on the conventional frame resulted in a weight reduction from 3000 to 2000  pounds , converted from 1.4 to 0.9  tons . There are no more documents about the exact composition. The vehicle itself has not been preserved either.

In a 1941 edition of the 'Popular Mechanics' a composition of flax , wheat , hemp and wood pulp is given. However, Lowell E. Overly, who was involved in the construction, said that only soybean fibers in a phenolic resin with formaldehyde were used for impregnation of the plant components . Renewable raw materials were used because of the shortage of metal at the time. With the outbreak of the Second World War , car production was stopped and with it the plastic car experiment. After the war, the project was neglected during the reconstruction work. The idea lives on as a bio-based plastic or in the use of fiber composite material .

Designation "hemp car"

The term Hemp Car ( German  Hanfauto ) spread for the vehicle after it had been reported in publications in 1999. The information was contradicting itself. According to the book Offbeat marijuana by US journalist Saul Rubin , the 1941 model should have been powered by hemp-derived fuel and the car itself should have been made from a combination of hemp and soy. According to the magazine Hightower Lowdown by activist Jim Hightower , who campaigned for the legalization of hemp cultivation in the USA , the body was made from a cellulose mass of hemp and sisal . Ford also made cars powered by an alcohol made from hemp .

film records

A 1941 film report circulating on the Internet about the car, which is referred to in the opening credits as the plastic hemp car , contains pictures of Henry Ford striking a trunk lid with a hammer. This is not the Soybean Car, but Ford's own car with a flap made of the plastic material. Jack Thompson is specified as the speaker in the opening credits; the opening credits do not come from the time the film was recorded. Thompson was also a spokesperson for Martin Baker's television documentary The Magic Weed ( La Sept / arte - Theopresse, 1995) on the history of hemp.

A shorter version of this video is also circulating on the Internet in a tone that seems contemporary for 1941. It does not contain the modern opening credits or the reference to Thompson.

Individual evidence

1. ^ ^{A b} Website of the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan
2. ^ Website of the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan
3. ^ Website of the Henry Ford Museum, Dearborn, Michigan
4. ^ Mathias Broeckers : Peak Oil. About the end of the oil age, the visions of the auto pioneers Diesel and Ford and the return of the universal raw material hemp. ( Part I , Part II ), in the online magazine Telepolis
5. ↑ Saul Rubin: Offbeat marijuana. The life and times of the world's grooviest plant. Santa Monica, California, 1999
6. ↑ Jim Higthower: Legalize Hemp ( Memento of the original from June 5, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Call of August 10, 2007 
7. ^ Hightower Lowdown. Issue 1, May 1999, p. 3. Quoted from Howard P. Segal: Recasting the machine age. Henry Ford's village industries. Amherst, Massachusetts, 2005, p. 221
8. ^ Film, images from 1941, 37 seconds
9. ^ Film, images from 1941, 26 seconds