Green automotive news has received a hit of exciting news. Motive Industries, a Calgary, Alberta-based company, has a new bio-composite electric-powered car within the works, as outlined by Fast Company. Kestrel is the name, and hemp is the green construction material. You heard right; it’s a green cannabis auto.
The Hemp-car Program energizes coming of Kestrel
Understandably, the Kestrel has sparked up controversy. We are talking about cannabis, and Americans cannot resist the boogeyman. But Hempcar.org’s 10,000-mile test run of a hemp biofueled car proved that it could work. The Kestrel – at least in early stages – can be made partly from hemp, but won’t run on hemp biofuel. The 2001 choice fuel automobile used hemp biodiesel for fuel, and 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 the industrial hemp necessary has no psychoactive properties and is not a drug, Hemp-car.org found America’s lack of response bewildering.
Alberta Innovates Technology Futures provides the hemp
So the supply chain for hemp runs from a farm in Vegreville, Alberta, to Alberta Innovates Technology Futures. They in turn supply the hemp for the Kestrel. The hemp makes for an very lightweight but solid automobile. Parts are very easily recyclable and also the construction is as strong as glass composite, writes Fast Business.It is unclear at this stage when Kestrel will enter the production phase, but Motive has plans to test the vehicle at great length later in 2010.
Henry Ford had this idea in 1925
”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 every bit of vegetable matter that could be fermented”.
Among the weeds Ford acknowledged was hemp. He even went as far as to construct a vehicle 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. Both Ford and farmers would likely have seen tremendous profits. However, Congress eventually passed the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. Thanks in large part to the influence of the DuPont company and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, weed 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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