A prototype hemp car created by American business magnate Henry Ford during World War II was years ahead of its time in terms of being eco-friendly. Unveiled by the then 77-year-old founder of Ford Motor Company in 1941, it was said to be 100% sustainable.
© JOHN LLOYD / Flickr.com / CC BY 2.0
Designed to combat steel rationing during the war and powered by plant-based fuel, it featured bodywork made from agricultural plastic. However, it never went into mass production and was largely forgotten about after the war.
Today, as governments all over the world try to make the automobile industry more environmentally friendly, the curious story of Ford’s hemp car has resurfaced.
Henry Ford’s background
Industrialist and philanthropist Henry Ford, born on a farm in Michigan in 1863, never attended high school. Fascinated by how things worked, he took apart and reassembled a watch given to him at the age of 12 by his father. He soon started repairing neighbours’ watches and had a small business by the time he was 15. He later learned bookkeeping at a commercial school.
In 1879, aged 16, Ford left home to work as an apprentice machinist, first for James F Flower & Brothers machine shop in Detroit, followed by a stint at Detroit Dry Dock Co.
He returned to the family farm in Dearborn, where he learned how to service the Westinghouse portable steam engine. Fascinated by an early Nichols and Shepard steam engine, it powered the first farm vehicle he had seen that wasn’t pulled by horses.
He built his own steam tractor and later a prototype car in the farm workshop, but didn’t continue with these ideas, deciding the boiler was too dangerous for light vehicles.
He also discounted the possibility of electric cars, as the weight and size of the battery would have been impractical and too costly to run.
Launch of Ford Motor Company
Experimenting with combustion engines for several years, Ford began building a two-cylinder engine in 1890, when he was 27 years old.
He had constructed his first motor car by 1892, with the engine powered by a four-horsepower two-cylinder motor. This was the start of his long career as one of the most famous vehicle manufacturers of the 20th century.
He founded Ford Motor Company in June 1903 in Detroit with £22,600 capital. The Model T Ford, launched in October 1908, was a pioneering car that every other company at the time tried to emulate.
After World War II broke out in 1939, Ford Motors became involved in aircraft production. They produced around 9,000 B24 Liberator bombers at their new purpose-built factory in Willow Run, near Detroit.
Hemp car
Development of the hemp car began partly due to Henry Ford’s personal interest in agricultural vehicles, according to the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn. He wanted to integrate agriculture with industry, as a wide range of plastics were already used in the manufacture of farm equipment.
Ford wished to replace cars’ metal parts with a new plastic material, which would ease the wartime shortage of metals. He also believed his design would be safer than a regular car.
Collaborating with inventor and agricultural scientist George Washington Carver and Eugene Turenne Gregorie, of Ford’s design department, they created and developed the prototype hemp car. The frame was constructed from slim tubular steel, covered by 14 plastic panels.
The exact formulation of the plastic wasn’t disclosed and there was much press speculation about how it was made. Most scientists believed it was a mixture of plant-based materials including hemp, wheat, flax and soybeans. This was how the vehicle came to be known as the soybean car or the hemp car.
100% green and ten times stronger than metal, it was said that Henry Ford proved its strength by hitting the panels with an axe, which bounced back rather than damaging the super-strength plastic. With acrylic windows, it weighed only 1,900 lbs compared with a weight of 2,500 lbs for a regular car of the same size.
It was powered by hemp ethanol fuel, made by fermenting the starches and sugars in hemp biomass. Ford said it was more cost-effective and sustainable than traditional fuels. It could be used in the same way as petrol, but produced fewer emissions and was made from renewable resources
As well as being eco-friendly, the car was also fuel-efficient, with the hemp ethanol producing 40 miles per gallon. The light weight of the car had an impact on this.
Why didn’t the hemp car catch on?
After the first public unveiling of the hemp car on 13th August 1941, sadly, the idea never really took off and it was considered more of a novelty than a viable mode of transport.
Historians believe the potential use of hemp ethanol fuel upset the oil industry and the government, both of whom made money out of petrol sales.
The engine had been designed in collaboration with the German mechanical engineer who invented the diesel engine, Rudolf Diesel.
Designing the hemp car’s engine to run off seed and vegetable oils, such as hemp, Henry Ford was quoted as saying vegetable oils were the future of fuels. He estimated enough fuel could be cultivated from one acre of potatoes in a year to drive the farm’s agricultural machinery for a century.
However, the political and economic climate reportedly went against the production of a sustainable hemp car. The petrol industry lobbied against ethanol fuel and won, as heavy restrictions were placed on the use of ethanol.
Eventually, it fell out of use altogether as a fuel, despite the prototype car having been exhibited as the “next big thing” at the Michigan State Fair, in 1941.
The hemp car’s development came to an end and by the end of World War II, it had vanished without a trace. The prototype didn’t survive - it was rumoured to have been destroyed by Gregorie.
Should hemp ethanol fuel be used today?
In recent years, due to climate change and the motor industry’s efforts to be more eco-friendly, there has been renewed interest in hemp ethanol fuel. Environmental campaigners and the automobile industry have been looking for sustainable transportation methods, with a renewable fuel that produces less emissions being high on the list of priorities.
Only time will tell if the idea takes off again, but experts believe it could have significant environmental benefits today.
If you owned a Ford car, would you be willing to drive a model powered by hemp ethanol fuel?
The question of what would happen to the 4.2 million Ford cars on UK roads today would also arise, as owners would surely rally against them becoming obsolete.
While it’s possible for Ford retrofit specialists to retrofit useful modern technology, such as reverse cameras, for example, fitting a whole new engine, or modifying an old one, is an extremely complex operation. Although it can be done, it isn’t cheap or easy.
Currently, a low ethanol content blended with petrol can potentially be used in some petrol engines. However, using pure ethanol fuel, or petrol blended with a higher percentage of ethanol, would require major modifications to any engine.
According to a study by Strathclyde University in Scotland, the last widescale use of ethanol blends of fuel in vehicles took place in Brazil in the 1970s. Some car companies modified vehicles on the production line so they could operate on a petrol blend that contained up to 24% ethanol.
However, it required extensive changes to the cylinder heads and walls, valves and valve seats, intake manifolds, pistons, piston rings and carburettors. Steel fuel lines and tanks had to be plated with nickel to prevent corrosion and higher fuel flow-rate injectors were needed to be compatible with the ethanol’s oxygenate qualities.
Would Ford or any other automobile manufacturer be willing to take on such a costly change on the production line at this stage, when everything is geared up to electric cars? Only time will tell.
