Henry Ford's Redemption Now Porsche and BMW Use Hemp for Their Cars
After the prototype created by Henry Ford in 1941, with a body made of natural fibres and powered by ethanol derived from hemp, in recent times several brands are reintroducing hemp inside their cars.
If hemp had been chosen for the body of cars and for the fuels that power them, the history of one of the most polluting and profitable industries on the planet would have been different. And it is not a far-fetched idea, given that at the dawn of this sector, which is now starting to think about the problems due to pollution and CO2 emissions, the visionary entrepreneur who created an empire that still exists today, had chosen hemp to create a car that unfortunately remained only a prototype.
Let's talk about Henry Ford and his Hemp car (or Soybean car), a car that had a body made of natural fibers such as hemp and soy and was powered by ethanol, also obtained from the plant with a thousand uses. Hemp is considered ideal for the production of biomass fuels such as ethanol, considered the fuel of the future. It is an alternative to petroleum and can be produced on a large scale through pyrolysis or fermentation processes. From hemp it is also possible to obtain a sort of biodiesel of natural origin that could partially or totally replace today's diesel, naphtha and derivatives.
Rereading this story today, one might think that either Ford was a fool, which is difficult to imagine given the caliber of the man and the entrepreneur, or that he tried to challenge, and lost, the nascent propaganda machine made in the USA that would soon try to eliminate from every latitude a vegetable that had until then accompanied the history of man for thousands of years.
In 1941, America was in full prohibitionist ferment with regards to the vegetable that until the century before, in some American states it was compulsory to cultivate and in others it was even a currency used to pay taxes and duties.
In 1937, the department headed by Henry Aslinger had in fact issued the now sadly famous Marijuana Tax Act, giving rise to a wave of prohibitionism that led to hemp being declared illegal in 1955 with consequences that we are still experiencing today. Not only that, because these were the years in which synthetic fibers such as nylon and petroleum derivatives were discovered to obtain plastic and fuel, highly polluting materials unlike the same products that could be obtained from the hemp plant. But, as several commentators have pointed out, owning an oil platform is something that only the powerful of the world can achieve, while hemp was "dangerous" precisely because it was accessible to everyone and therefore a resource impossible to control at a desk. Pearl Harbor, the entry of the United States into the war and the new priorities of American industry, in addition to the death of Ford in 1947, did the rest.
But for a few years now, the trend of using natural fibers to make cars lighter and more resistant has been making a comeback on the market. In 2013, BMW announced that in its i3 electric car model, it had used hemp to replace plastic and metal parts, making it weigh about 350 kilograms less than its direct competitors. In the same year, Canadian Motive Industries had developed another compact electric car, called Kestrel, which uses hemp stalks infused with polymer resin to replace fiberglass in the vehicle's body, to reduce weight and improve efficiency. 
In 2016, it was Renew Sport car, a company based in Florida, that created a new car, this time with a body made of 100% hemp fibers, and which can be powered by ethanol or biodiesel. Bruce Dietzen, the president of the company, had toured America with the prototype of the car to talk about the benefits of hemp and said that: "Bioethanol has its advantages, it is a fuel that does not require any modification to the engine. The Ford prototype had a pollution footprint regarding CO2 that was about half that of today's electric vehicles". Not only that, because: "Hemp is lighter than steel or fiberglass, making the car more efficient, it resists dents, it is not fragile like carbon fiber, and above all it is biodegradable". Speaking of resistance, on the Internet it is easy to come across photos and videos that show Ford hitting the body of the Hemp car with a hammer or with an axe, to demonstrate its resistance.
The most recent example is Porsche, which has created the first racing car that contains hemp and flax in its interior. This is the new Porsche 718 Cayman GT4 Clubsport, for which, as a company press release states, “the focus was not only on further improved driveability and faster lap times, but also on the sustainable use of raw materials. The driver and co-driver doors and the rear wing are made of a mix of organic fibers, which mainly come from agricultural by-products such as flax or hemp fibers and have similar properties to carbon fiber in terms of weight and stiffness.”
“Why consume forests that took centuries to grow and mines that took entire geological eras to establish, when we can get the equivalent of forests and mineral products from the annual growth of hemp fields?” This is Ford’s question that has gone down in history, to which for decades the answer has been a long and embarrassed silence.
The entrepreneur, anticipating the environmental issues that are creating protest movements all over the world, wanted to create a car with natural products, safer and lighter than traditional cars, and less polluting. Almost 80 years have passed since then, but we still have not arrived at a convincing solution.
