Finding option energizes and greener ways of getting from point A to point B now is back within the spotlight. Motive Industries of Calgary, Alberta, has announced plans to introduce Canada’s first bio-composite electric automobile, reports Fast Business. Kestrel is the name, and hemp is the green construction material. It’s a cannabis-constructed auto.
The Hemp-car Program energizes the Kestrel generation
The Kestrel will no doubt spur clouds of controversy. Hempcar.org triumphantly got the ball rolling when they tested a hemp fueled biodiesel on a 10,000-mile excursion. In its earliest renditions, the Kestrel won’t run on hemp biofuel like the Hemp-car.org model, but that might change in the near future. If only the United States would legalize the growing of industrial hemp, they could enjoy such vehicular greenery. You will find no psychoactive elements to industrial hemp and it isn’t a drug, so the America’s stance is strange, considering the potential benefits.
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.When Kestrel nevertheless has a methods to go before full production, Motive expects they’ll be able to start testing by year’s end.
Henry Ford was ahead of the game 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 Henry Ford to the New York Times nearly 90 years ago, or so Hempcar.org says. “There is fuel in every bit of vegetable matter that could be fermented”.
Hemp was reportedly one of the plant materials on which Ford had his eye. 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. There would are mutual benefit. 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, cannabis was criminalized in America.
Additional 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
