From the “eco” Ford built with cannabis to the non-biodegradable Duroplast of the Trabant

He was the first to achieve mass motorisation with the legendary Model T, and also a completely revolutionary prototype following a philosophical and utopian inspiration: everything from the land and a fruitful marriage between industry and agriculture. It was August 13, 1941 when Henry Ford presented the Hemp Body Car, which he himself designed along the lines of inspiration in 1937, after an initial and unsuccessful gestation by the head of the design department Eugene Turenne Gregoire.

The peculiarity was that its plastic body was made from hemp seeds (cannabis) and soy. It weighed a third less than a car of the same size, and instead of petrol it was powered by hemp ethanol and other vegetable oils. The inventor of the assembly line was convinced that the fuel of the future could come from nature. To pursue his dream he commissioned a team of specialists coordinated by Lowell E. Overly and the genius of the botanist and chemist George Washington Craver, who settled at the Soybean Laboratory in Greenfield Village.

The debut of the prototype made with fibers and plastic at the Dearborn Festival

The prototype, after a series of design and construction problems, was presented at the Ford headquarters, at the Dearborn Festival, in Michigan, with the founder himself at the wheel. The elegant bodywork covering a classic metal tube frame was made of cellulose fiber panels from hemp, soy and other natural elements. The material obtained from a mixture of plant fibers held together by a cellulose resin, once delivered to a standard formula, was easy to work with, much lighter than steel and above all much more resistant. The car weighed less than a ton and was about 500 kilos lighter than any other rival.

But so solid that Henry Ford himself let himself be filmed while hitting the bodywork of the Hemp Body Car to test its sturdiness, without causing the slightest damage.

The Second World War stops the revolutionary project

The press of the time was amazed by this invention, which someone smugly nicknamed the Soybean Car for the use of soy. Lightness, versatility, economy, resistance seemed to have indicated the way to the future, but what could have appeared as a real technological breakthrough clashed with the winds of history. On December 7, 1941, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States officially entered the Second World War which absorbed energies of all kinds.

The automotive industry was obviously at the forefront of winning that conflict, and so the Hemp Body Car remained a unique example, despite being a ready-made response to the steel shortage which had enormous demands from the war industry.

Roosevelt’s Marijuana Tax Act made cannabis cultivation unsustainable

The Marijuana Tax Act of 1937 also contributed significantly to preventing any development of that vehicle.

With the lack of raw material to feed a possible assembly line, Ford’s dream also came to an end, as he had seen hemp as an ecological material, easy and quick to grow and with very low production costs, in an ingenious combination with plastic. The Hemp Body Car, with its 14 revolutionary panels, would never go into production, and the prototype was even destroyed, probably in 1946. The eco-friendly, biofuel car disappeared from view.

The polluting, unsafe and non-disposable GDR car

Only one element would survive in Henry Ford’s range of proposals: the alternative to steel. The technicians of the German Democratic Republic thought about it on the other side of the Iron Curtain when they conceived and put into production the P50 (later P60 and then 601) in 1957, a popular car destined to become very famous after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an event which it did not survive. The plastic body material was called Duroplast and they covered a small car with a two-stroke engine, which was originally supposed to be a motorcycle and to which they added two wheels.

Pleasant to look at, but the denial of any concept of ecology, safety, and modernity. It was polluting beyond any tolerable limit, unsafe and sloppy in its construction and maintenance. It is also said, and this is not an exaggeration, that in order to have it in an acceptable time frame, the Eastern Germans booked it at the Zwickau factory when a child was born, so when they turned eighteen there was some well-founded hope of having it and being able to drive it. With all its limitations, and there were many, it was however a kind of forbidden dream of socialist realism.

Symbol of the fall of the Wall, it disappears from the streets and returns as paving

It would later be discovered that the choice of name, Duroplast, although extolling a strength that wasn’t there (it crumbled in the event of a collision), had been ominously prophetic. It wasn’t hard but it lasted, because we didn’t know how to recycle those non-biodegradable chemical mixture panels produced in over 3 million copies. Until it was invented that it could be reused, by shredding it, as road paving. Until then, nothing and no one had managed to dispose of that plastic, until decades after the disappearance of the Trabant (and the brand), when it had nevertheless entered the iconography and collective imagination. In search of freedom through Hungary, endless lines of Trabants loaded beyond belief with people, household goods and hopes tried to enter Europe and were then often abandoned near border crossings, leaving the blue, smelly smoke and the echo of the noisy and unlikely engine to evaporate.