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The Kestrel vehicle a Canadian marijuana wonder


Greener modes of transportation received a piece of good news lately. Calgary, Alberta's Motive Industries is introducing an electric automobile with a bio-composite design that will surely take Canada by storm. Kestrel is the name, and hemp is the green construction material. Indeed, it is a pot vehicle that will no doubt be affixed with the moniker "pot car" by those who do not understand horticulture. Source for this article - Canada has high hopes for Kestrel cannabis car by Newystype.com.

Hempcar Podium foretold the Kestrel's appearance

As with other things involving hemp and pot, the Kestrel weed automobile has stirred attention. But Hempcar.org's 10,000-mile test run of a hemp biofueled automobile proved that it could work. In its earliest renditions, the Kestrel won't run on hemp biofuel like the Hemp-car.org model, but that might change in the near future. If only the U.S. would legalize the growing of industrial hemp, they could enjoy such vehicular greenery. Considering the industrial hemp necessary has no psychoactive properties and is not a drug, Hempcar.org found America's lack of response bewildering.

With hemp from Alberta Innovates Technology Futures

The Kestrel gets its hemp raw material from a Vegreville, Alberta farm via Alberta Innovates Technology Futures. Fast Company reports that the use of hemp in frame/body construction makes for a much lighter vehicle, plus it's easy to recycle parts. Not only that, but the hemp compound is as strong as glass composite.Motive is not ready to start ripping Kestrels off the assembly line just yet, but testing a prototype should certainly begin before 2010 comes to a close.

In 1925, Henry Ford saw the future

"The fuel of the future is going to come from fruit like that sumach out by the road, or from apples, weeds, sawdust -- almost anything," said the prescient Henry Ford to the New York Times during the Great Depression. "There is fuel in each bit of vegetable matter that can be fermented," Ford continued.

Henry Ford most certainly was including hemp within the above discussion. To prove his theory, he made a auto out of hardened hemp fibers and fueled it with ethanol made from hemp biodiesel fuel. If all had gone as outlined by plan, Ford could have helped conserve America from the Good Depression via his ideas for "Farm Chemurgy". It would benefit Ford tremendously and revive American agriculture. But then came the Marijuana Tax Act of 1937. There'd been a series of battles leading to that point in Congressional history. Thanks in large part to the influence of the DuPont business and newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst, weed was criminalized in America.

 

More on this topic

Fast Company

fastcompany.com/1684111/motive-industries-hemp-ev?partner=rss

Hempcar.org

hempcar.org/ford.shtml

Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_history_of_cannabis_in_the_United_States