On this day in vegan history · August 13, 1941
Ford Unveils a Car Grown From Soybeans
In Dearborn, Henry Ford showed off a car body built mostly from soybeans, wheat, and corn, and promised he'd grow the next one from the ground up.
The facts
- Date
- August 13, 1941
- Location
- Dearborn, Michigan
- Weight
- About 1,900 pounds, versus roughly 2,500 pounds for an equivalent all-steel car
- Construction
- Fourteen plastic panels, about a quarter-inch thick, on a tubular steel frame
On August 13, 1941, Ford introduced a car in Dearborn, Michigan whose fourteen body panels were made not of steel but of a plastic derived largely from soybeans, wheat, and corn, mounted on a tubular steel frame. Ford had been pouring money into soybean research for years and brought in George Washington Carver to help find industrial uses for the crop. Wartime steel rationing gave the project a practical edge: a plastic-bodied car used far less scarce metal than a conventional one. Ford framed it as something bigger than a wartime workaround, a demonstration that farms could substitute for mines. World War II cut the experiment short. Car production itself was curtailed for the war's duration, and by the time it ended, the plastic car idea had quietly died with it.
In their words
The day in the words of the people who were there. Every quote is verbatim, and every source links out so you can check it.
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grow automobiles from the soil
Henry Ford, describing his ambitions for the soybean car
Source: Wikipedia
Why it still matters
Decades before 'plant-based' became a label on a supermarket shelf, an industrialist was trying to grow a literal car out of a bean field, betting that plants could out-compete steel and, eventually, oil. The war ended that particular bet, but the underlying idea, that agriculture can replace industries built on extraction, didn't die with it.
Sources
This history is still being written.
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