Auto Makers Tried Building Cars Out of Plexiglass and Stainless Steel

Do you remember that early Ford cars, the early Ford cars were made with hemp? All of his fenders and everything were made with hemp. And there's a video of him taking a hammer and a sledge and banging it off the fenders. And it shows you the insane durability that hemp fibers have. Have you ever seen that? Yeah, but he never, that never made it into production, right? I think that was a wartime shortage R&D effort. Same thing with stainless. You ever seen any of the prototype? A couple of them still exist, but stainless. Yeah. So Ford, I think it was the 37 Tudor. It was a 61 maybe? T-Bird was the newest. And there was a third one that the entire body is made out of stainless. And there's so bad ass. And then GM did one during World War II during the metal shortage time. Entire plexiglass Buick sedan. It sold at auction recently. And I, I was so fucking tempted. So the entire body is clear. Like you see through the doors, you see the window regulators, the locks, all of the other things. It is so bad ass. And it sold for what didn't seem like an absurd, it was like 180, 200 grand. Wow. And it is a plexiglass. So actually, can you Google that image? It's a plexiglass prototype Buick, I think it was. Hopefully we'll find it. Super, super nifty. Wow. I know that, what is the company? Lotus. Lotus developed a hemp fiber car. They did like an anniversary, one of their, what is it, a stage or whatever the fuck it is. There it is. There it is. To the left. Wow. One more, one more over. Yeah. Look at that. That's insane. It's like, are you kidding me? That's crazy. So fucking cool. That's crazy. Apparently it cracked and proved not to be viable. So I'm sure it's a piece of shit. But just as like a sculpture to have here in your man cave, this thing is so bad. Yeah. Really cool. I like, there's all the, is that safety bracing on the doors, structural bracing on the doors? Also for a while, like I wanted to do, there was a Dow Corning and somebody else. There was a big consortium that was doing a bio derivative molded plastic concepts. So like for your city trash cans and stuff and the durability and the life cycles and everything were epic. And I was thinking for a while, like how bad ass would it be invest all the money in the platform of the vehicular engineering and then make the body literally by design almost disposable. So when it's at the end of its life cycle, it literally could turn into mulch and go on the ground and be totally neutral or more interestingly, more liberating for a consumer and a designer. Like let's say that same platform you had, you could have like a dune buggy style. Like, okay, I'm going to take it out to the desert and we're going to go elk hunting or whatever the hell you're going to do that weekend. Right. Anyone like a buggy, druggy style or, you know, we're doing construction at the house and we're going to use it for, you know, hauling soil or whatever. So you could have like modular bodies and different applications used on the same platform, but all bio derivative materials. I think that'd be super cool. Well, I've always wondered why someone didn't, but besides Lotus didn't make another hemp bodied car because you know, Corvette still use plexiglass or fiberglass for all their cars, but hemp is far superior. It is. And you, it's another one of those things like why isn't that moving forward? Who doesn't want that moving forward? Maybe you should do it. Maybe we should make like a 69 Corvette, but make all the panels redo them in hemp fiber. I hate to say it, but you're going up against the petrochemical industry and I do not want to be that different. For you? Sure. I mean all the petrochemical interests in plastics. If you're just rebuilding something, do you really think that it would be that big of a deal? Like they would come after you. If like, if you took all the body panels off and by the way, it would probably be so much stronger. If you watch the video of, see if you can find that video of Henry Ford banging the hammer off of a... I'm reading about it right now. It might not have been what was like... He lied? He didn't lie. The people that putting out the video lied, I guess is what this article says. What does it say? The angry historian wrote a big blog about it, dug through it. That seems to be a prototype as he was saying, and it was probably plastic. It might have been some hemp in there, but it wasn't even 50% hemp. It's a binder maybe. It wasn't even 50% hemp? Right. Well, how does he know that? The patents. All the places that the information came from, from the 40s and all the places that they were talking about making... The angry historian's pretty balls out serious when he makes the statement. He does his homework. Interesting. I had a friend who had a stalk of hemp, one of those, the base of a hemp tree on his desk, and he's like, pick that up. And I picked it up and it looks like a piece of oak. Like it looks like... And we feel it. It's really hard, but it's really light. It's the weirdest plant. I don't know if you ever held a piece of hemp, like a hemp stalk. It's like an alien plant. It doesn't seem to make any sense. Yeah. And its properties and its structure is so unique and there's so many benefits to it, for sure. Yeah, I would think... See if you can find that lotus, the hemp lotus. They had it where the front stripe down the center was clear coat, so you could see the actual hemp fiber in the lotus. But no one's ever done anything. I mean, they still make Corvettes out of plastic. I mean, still making them out of fiberglass. I would think that that would be a real straightforward approach, especially now that hemp is legalized and you can grow it in the United States and most states, I think it's federally legal. Yeah. For my leather goods, like this jacket is all hemp thread. Really? It's super strong. It's better than anything. So that stripe down the middle is all the clear coat natural hemp fiber. So that whole car is made out of hemp.