A sports car made from cannabis hemp could lead the charge in making carbon neutral vehicles. Made from the chassis of a Mazda convertible, the hemp car is bringing a new meaning to the phrase ‘green machine’ and could soon be seen on high roads around the world. The man behind the car, Bruce Dietzen from Florida, hopes his environmentally friendly automobile could help debunk the taboo behind the cannabis plant and its uses. Bruce was inspired to build the sports car after hearing about renowned industrialist, Henry Ford, using the durable material in 1941 to build the world’s first hemp car.
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MotorTranscript
00:00When I actually started to take a look at the numbers and just how green the
00:04car was, it was amazing to me. That's when I was convinced I have to make this car
00:08out of cannabis.
00:19You'll probably think that looks like a regular fiberglass car or even a steel
00:25car just looking at it. When you go up and you touch it and you knock on it
00:28you'll go like wow that's fiberglass but actually it's not fiberglass. We used
00:32about typically about three plies of woven hemp and that made it rigid
00:37enough to keep its shape. Built by Bruce Dietzen, this stunning sports car is made
00:43from around a hundred pounds of hemp as well as being a lot lighter than
00:47fiberglass or steel. The unusual material has another impressive quality. It's ten
00:52times more dent resistant than steel. I'm not going to do that right now.
00:59Although this prototype is built on a Mazda chassis, Bruce hopes that if the
01:04car gets to production that too will be made from hemp. He took his inspiration
01:09from Henry Ford, the great pioneer of affordable motoring who was said to have
01:14experimented with hemp as both a material and a fuel in the 1940s. Not
01:20everyone is familiar with Henry Ford's cannabis car. It was made not only out of
01:25cannabis but also used soy for the resin and it also used flax and some other
01:30things wheat straw etc. The most interesting aspect of that car is that
01:36he used both cannabis for the strength in the body and then he also used cannabis
01:42remnants he would make that into a fuel. His car, incredibly, was about three times
01:49greener than today's electric vehicles because of how it was made and then how
01:53it was fueled. Bruce estimates that building the car cost him around two
01:58hundred thousand dollars in cash and a further two hundred thousand dollars in
02:02lost earnings but he hopes his project will help him spread his environmental
02:07message. It sets an example and it lets people know that we can make everything
02:14out of plants. That's what Henry Ford was really out to tell everyone when he
02:20created his first cannabis car. So you pull up buddy, the car's amazing. Thank you.
02:25Amazing. This is beautiful. We may not be able to pull up to our local gas stations
02:31right now and say fill it up with hemp gasoline because we have to wait for
02:35these fuel companies to catch up and start doing the right thing. It's really
02:38a symbolic product right now but I think as we go into the future we're gonna see
02:42more and more companies realizing that what we have to do is start making
02:46things from plants if we're going to turn things around and start to reverse
02:51climate change. As well as wanting to get the car to manufacture, Bruce is
02:55developing a TV show featuring the car which will look at all the possibilities
03:00for the use of hemp in the future. I live in Florida. Hemp is still illegal to grow
03:07in Florida. I had to import the woven material all the way from China because
03:12we still don't even have facilities that can make fabrics like like this out
03:16of hemp. It has to come out of places like China. What a terrible wasted
03:20opportunity. We could be employing all these people. We're gonna take the
03:23car around the country and investigate these things because if cannabis can be
03:28used this many different ways we've got to accelerate the process of making it
03:33legal across the country and start using it more and more and more for both
03:37ecological purposes, medical purposes, etc.