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.
03:00I 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, but we're going to take the car around the country
03:23and investigate these things because if cannabis can be used this many different ways,
03:28we've got to accelerate the process of making it legal across the country
03:33and start using it more and more and more for both ecological purposes and medical purposes, etc.
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