Greener modes of transportation received a piece of good news lately. Fast Company indicates that a Calgary, Alberta, company called Motive Industries is bringing a new electric automobile with bio-composite design to market in Canada. The bio-composite vehicle will be known as the Kestrel, and also the green bio factor is hemp. It’s a cannabis-constructed car.
Marijuana car something of the Hempcar Manifesto
The Kestrel will no doubt spur clouds of controversy. Canadian activist group Hempcar.org trumpeted a 2001 American road tour of 10,000 miles undertaken by a car similar to the Kestrel, but not constructed of weed fiber. In its earliest renditions, the Kestrel won’t run on hemp biofuel like the Hemp-car.org model, but that may change in the near future. The 2001 alternative fuel automobile used hemp biodiesel for fuel, and also the group stressed at the time that if hemp could legally be cultivated in the United States, greater fuel economy and lesser environmental impact would be within reach. Considering that the industrial hemp necessary has no psychoactive properties and is not a drug, Hempcar.org found America’s lack of response bewildering.
Alberta Innovates Technology Futures provides the hemp
The Kestrel gets its hemp raw material from a Vegreville, Alberta farm via Alberta Innovates Technology Futures. Hemp for body construction is lightweight, renewable and strong as glass composite, reports Fast Company.It is unclear at this stage when Kestrel will enter the production phase, but Motive has plans to test the automobile at good length later in 2010.
Back in 1925, Henry Ford knew it would work
According to Hempcar.org, Henry Ford told the New York Times that “The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust — almost anything,” he said. ”There is fuel in bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented”.
Henry Ford most certainly was including hemp within the above discussion. He even went so far as to construct a car of resin-stiffened hemp fiber that ran on ethanol made from hemp. American farmers faced economic calamity during the ongoing recession, and Ford envisioned a movement toward “Farm Chemurgy” that would cultivate plant and vegetable material as vehicular fuel sources and body construction elements. It would benefit Ford tremendously and revive American agriculture. But then came the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. There’d been a series of battles leading to that point in Congressional history. The DuPont business and William Randolph Hearst, a newspaper baron with a fortune in the timber industry, basically shut down hemp cultivation in the United States of America on a large scale.
Further reading
Fast Company
fastcompany.com/1684111/motive-industries-hemp-ev?partner=rss
Hempcar.org
hempcar.org/ford.shtml
Wikipedia
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_history_of_cannabis_in_the_United_States
