Some of Henry Ford’s ideas were way ahead of their time. In fact a few ideas were so far out that they went nowhere, but not for lack of merit. For example, Ford was always looking for ways to save money on the costs of materials but without sacrificing quality, design integrity or safety. From his childhood background on a farm, and because many of his customers were farmers, Ford was deeply interested in agriculture. Ford often commented that crops could grow quickly, “as compared with lumber or especially iron ore.” So Ford funded a laboratory to assist farmers to find a way to use crops in industrial applications. Ford hired a highly regarded chemist named Robert Boyer to run the lab, where dozens of workers researched industrial uses for farm crops such as cantaloupes, carrots and beets.
Among other crops, Henry Ford was a great promoter of soybeans. In one marketing effort that Ford intended to impress his farmer-customers, every vehicle that Ford sold came with a bushel of soybeans on the front seat. And during the Great Depression, Ford entertained visitors at luncheons in which every course contained locally grown soybeans. The Ford menu included tomato juice with soybean sauce, soybean cookies and soybean candy for dessert.
But Ford used soybeans to do more than just amuse visitors at lunch. Ford was looking for projects that combined industry with the output of agriculture. Among other things, Ford had an abiding interest in developing soybean-based plastics. Throughout the 1930s Ford pioneered the use of soybeans in plastics that he used in his automobiles. The soybean components included plastic parts (even body panels), seat covers and paint. Ford’s soybean-automobile project culminated in August 1941, when he patented an automobile made almost entirely of soybean plastic, attached to a tubular welded frame.
Ford’s soybean-car weighed 30% less than a car made of steel. Even better, the plastic panels did not rust. And an array of experiments concluded that they were ten times as durable as steel. Ford claimed that plastic panels made the car safer than traditional steel cars because the car could roll over without being crushed. Ford hoped that the new soybean plastic would replace metal, which was in short supply in the years just before World War II as the U.S. government was building up the country’s navy. Furthermore, Ford’s soybean-car ran on grain alcohol — yes, ethanol — instead of gasoline.
Ford’s engineers were building a second soybean-based car when the U.S. entered World War II in December 1941. Because of the war, the federal government suspended all U.S. automobile production for the duration of the conflict. Thus Ford’s soybean-based car experiment languished. Almost all of the Ford Company’s resources were directed towards war-related production. Indeed, in one gigantic undertaking Ford converted the massive facility at Willow Run, Michigan to building B-24 bombers. At one point during the war, the Willow Run plant rolled a brand-new B-24 — made of over 140,000 separate parts — off the assembly line every hour. This was a far cry from building automobiles — made of soybeans or otherwise. By the end of the war in September 1945 the idea of a soybean car had simply fallen through the cracks.
Henry Ford died in 1947, aged 84. And we can only speculate about what might have happened if Henry Ford and his company had continued to pursue the idea of a car made out of soybeans, and powered by ethanol