Green automotive news has received a hit of exciting news. Fast Company indicates that a Calgary, Alberta, business called Motive Industries is bringing a new electric automobile with bio-composite design to market in Canada. The bio-composite car will be known as the Kestrel, and also the green bio factor is hemp. It’s a cannabis-constructed auto.
Hempcar Program foretold the Kestrel’s appearance
As with anything else involving hemp and marijuana, the Kestrel pot automobile has stirred attention. Canadian activist group Hempcar.org trumpeted a 2001 American road tour of 10,000 miles undertaken by a automobile similar to the Kestrel, but not constructed of weed fiber. The experimental auto they used ran on hemp biodiesel, which is not presently the case with the Kestrel, although it might eventually come to pass. The United States of America has yet to make cultivating industrial hemp lawful, though, so they won’t know what it’s like. There are no psychoactive elements to industrial hemp and it’s not a drug, so the America’s stance is strange, thinking about the potential benefits.
Hemp courtesy of Alberta Innovates Technology Futures
Alberta Innovates Technology Futures provides the hemp for the Kestrel and purchases its cannabis stock from an industrial hemp farm located in Vegreville, Alberta. Fast Business reports that the use of hemp in frame/body construction makes for a much lighter vehicle, plus it’s easy to recycle parts. Not only that, but the hemp compound is as strong as glass composite.Motive is not ready to start ripping Kestrels off the assembly line just yet, but testing a prototype should certainly start before 2010 comes to a close.
In 1925, Henry Ford saw the future
”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,” said the prescient Henry Ford to the New York Times during the Good Depression. ”There is fuel in each and every bit of vegetable matter that could be fermented,” Ford continued.
Henry Ford most certainly was including hemp in the above discussion. He even went as far as to construct a vehicle of resin-stiffened hemp fiber that ran on ethanol made from hemp. If all had gone as outlined by plan, Ford could have helped save America from the Great Depression via his ideas for “Farm Chemurgy”. 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. Thanks in large part to the influence of the DuPont business and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, pot was criminalized in America.
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
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