So a group of kids put together a car fueled by soy beans.

Here's the story.

Why haven't the big car companies engineered and offered such cars to the public or this just like the cornahol(or ethanol)that was once sold years ago?

The kids' teacher thinks that it's due to the big oil companies. What do you think?

Henry Ford and His Magic Beanstalk

By David L. Lewis

In 1932 and 1933 Ford planted three hundred varieties of soybeans on some eight thousand acres of his farms. He also urged Michigan farmers to follow suit, assuring them that the Ford Motor Company would provide a market for soybeans. By 1933 his experimentation-on which he spent $1.2 million – was rewarded with the discovery of a soybean oil that made a superior enamel for painting automobiles and for oiling casting molds and a soybean meal that was molded into the horn button.

The discoveries excited Ford. "By now," Fortune magazine reported in late 1933, "he is as much interested in the soya bean as he is in the V-8. "Two years later, a bushel of soybeans went into the paint, horn button, gearshift knob, door handles, window trim, accelerator pedal and timing gears of every Ford car. Numerous other small parts of the Ford car eventually were made of soybean-derived material.

By late 1937 Ford’s research laboratory, under the direction of youthful, self-trained Robert Boyer, had developed a curved plastic sheet Ford hoped would replace steel in automobile bodies. A few weeks later the magnate called in reporters, jumped up and down on the unbending sheet and triumphantly exclaimed, "If that was steel, it would have caved in." He added "Almost all new cars will soon be made of such things as soybeans" and that the most prosperous era in American history was "just around the corner" because industry was opening up a "whole new field for agricultural by-products."

Henry Ford tests soy plastic car body 1941.jpg (14748 bytes)By 1940 Boyer installed a plastic trunk lid on one of Ford’s personal cars. The industrialist delighted in walloping the lid with an axe for the benefit of skeptics who questioned its dent resistance. He then invited onlookers to swing the axe against their own cars. In November 1940 Ford again startled reporters with his axe demonstration and predicted that his company would be mass-producing "plastic-bodied" automobiles within one to three years, "I wouldn’t be surprised," he declared, "if our [soybean research] laboratory comes to be the most important building of our entire plant." - www.thesoydaily.com
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The road not taken has made all the difference.

During the same period in which Ford’s laboratory developed plastic panels for cars, it also developed a fiber from soybean protein that resembled a soft wool. Because of its high resilience and natural crimp, it was used for car upholsteries in seat filing and for clothing.

Henry Ford in his soy fiber suit 3.jpg (183710 bytes)By 1938 Ford often sported a tie made from soybean fiber. Three years later he made a public appearance in a "soybean suit." The Detroit Times reported, "H is as delighted as a boy with his first pair of long pants." - Same Source

I read all those articles and I wonder what happened to the whole impetus to use soy to buld those car panels and parts since they were so resilient!

I mean hitting a car panel with an axe and not having it bust or dent would really be a major improvement on the tin cans we ride in today.

I have to wornder if the steel industry subtly got into the whole thing and nixed the efforts for improved cars like that. The same way they got into it with that improved carborator for much better gas mileage and buried that improvement for the next millenia.