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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00:00When I actually started to take a look at the numbers and just how green the car
00:04was, it was amazing to me. That's when I was convinced, I have to make this car out of cannabis.
00:09You'll probably think that looks like a regular fiberglass car or even a steel car just looking
00:26at it. When you go up and you touch it and you knock on it, you'll go, wow, that's fiberglass.
00:30But actually it's not fiberglass. We used typically about three plies of woven hemp and that made
00:36it rigid enough to keep its shape. Built by Bruce Dietzen, this stunning sports
00:42car is made from around 100 pounds of hemp, as well as being a lot lighter than fiberglass
00:47or steel. The unusual material has another impressive quality.
00:51It's 10 times more dent-resistant than steel. I'm not going to do that right now.
00:58Although this prototype is built on a Mazda chassis, Bruce hopes that if the car gets
01:05to production, that too will be made from hemp. He took his inspiration from Henry Ford, the
01:11great pioneer of affordable motoring, who was said to have experimented with hemp as both
01:16a material and a fuel in the 1940s.
01:19Not everyone is familiar with Henry Ford's cannabis car. It was made not only out of cannabis,
01:26but also used soy for the resin, and it also used flax and some other things, wheat straw,
01:31etc. The most interesting aspect of that car is that he used both cannabis for the strength
01:39in the body, and then he also used cannabis remnants. He would make that into a fuel. His car, incredibly,
01:48was about three times greener than today's electric vehicles because of how it was made and then
01:53how it was fueled.
01:55Bruce estimates that building the car cost him around $200,000 in cash and a further $200,000
02:02in lost earnings. But he hopes his project will help him spread his environmental message.
02:07It sets an example and it lets people know that we can make everything out of plants. That's what
02:16Henry Ford was really out to tell everyone when he created his first cannabis car.
02:21So you pull up, buddy. The car's amazing.
02:25Amazing. This is beautiful, man.
02:28We may not be able to pull up to our local gas stations right now and say fill it up with
02:32hemp gasoline because we have to wait for these fuel companies to catch up and start doing
02:37the right thing. It's really a symbolic product right now, but I think as we go into the future,
02:41we're going to see more and more companies realizing that what we have to do is start making things
02:46from plants if we're going to turn things around and start to reverse climate change.
02:51As well as wanting to get the car to manufacture, Bruce is developing a TV show featuring the car,
02:57which will look at all the possibilities for the use of hemp in the future.
03:01I live in Florida. Hemp is still illegal to grow in Florida. I had to import the woven material
03:09all the way from China because we still don't even have facilities that can make fabrics like this out of hemp.
03:16It has to come out of places like China. What a terrible wasted opportunity.
03:19We could be employing all these people. We're going to take the car around the country and investigate these things
03:25because if cannabis can be used this many different ways, we've got to accelerate the process of making it legal
03:32across the country and start using it more and more and more for both ecological purposes and medical purposes, etc.