The height of technology 70 years ago, Henry Ford's 'plastic' car was scuppered by the Second World War.
Photograph by: From the collections of The Henry Ford/ THF73153, From the collections of The Henry Ford/ THF73153
Henry Ford unveiled the first plastic car in Dearborn, Mich., 70 years ago. The cream-coloured automobile was a by-product of Mr. Ford’s life-long ambition to marry modern technology with his agricultural roots. Appropriately, the titan of industry chose a community fair just miles away from the farm where he grew up for the car’s unveiling.
The vehicle was essentially a Ford 60, with the same metal chassis, wheels and engine, but with 14 plastic panels affixed to the frame. The panels were constructed using a state-of-the art chemical compound that was reinforced with fibres derived from wheat, cotton, flax and soybean, which earned it the nickname “the Soybean Car.” The Soybean Car was the height of modern technology at the time. Its plastic components reduced the weight of the car by about a third compared with similar-sized steel car.
Mr. Ford boasted that it was also safer, because unlike a steel car, when it rolled in an accident it wouldn’t be crushed. The unique design also reduced the need for metals like chrome and steel, which were in high demand in North America at the time. But, alas, the promises of Mr. Ford’s plastic car were quickly thwarted. The second unit barely hit the production line before the U.S. entered the Second World War, halting all auto production and leaving the Soybean Car to fall through the cracks of history.
Until now. The echoes of Mr. Ford’s ambitions are finding their way into a new partnership between Magna International Inc. and the National Research Council (NRC), which have begun work at a new facility, known as the Magna-NRC Composites Centre of Excellence, north of Toronto in Concord, Ont. The facility, which has yet to be formally opened, was established with the expressed goal of increasing the amount of plastic components used in modern-day vehicles, trying to marry the NRC’s expertise working with high-performance composite parts in the aerospace sector, for example, with the lean-manufacturing practices championed by Magna.
Their efforts to make these plastic composite parts more affordable for mass production have led them full circle. Like Mr. Ford’s work seven decades ago, the Magna-NRC partnership is trying to find ways to use organic materials derived from hemp, jute, rayon, lignans and other natural products to bring the weight and cost of the plastic parts down.
The use of these so-called thermoplastics and thermosets is not uncommon in the auto industry. Manufacturers from Audi to Mercedes-Benz and McLaren have been using a lot of them in their luxury vehicles for years. Lesser-quality plastics are often used on more mainstream vehicles for a plethora of parts, like running boards, bumpers and oil pans. But the Magna-NRC partnership’s ambitions are to make the use of these composites ubiquitous in automobile production, including in frames, chassis and bodies, which are now made of metal, said William Harney, Magna’s director of engineering and development. While the thought of driving a plastic car might not be that reassuring to consumers, Mr. Harney said some of these plastics are just as strong as steel. “They can be stronger,” he said. “Through the use of composites, we are able to reduce the weight by 60%, and bring other inherent benefits, like corrosion resistance and improved design and styling.”
The efforts of this new-found partnership are becoming increasingly important as fuel prices rise. North American consumers have demonstrated time and again through their buying habits that they don’t want smaller vehicles, they want more fuel-efficient ones, Mr. Harney said. There are only two ways to keep the utility of these larger vehicles and increase their fuel-efficiency — either through improving their drivetrain or by making the vehicles lighter. Magna has done a great deal of work to improve its drivetrains, including through hybridization. Meanwhile, the use of plastic composites is leading the charge to reduce the weight, Mr. Harney said. “The mounting pressure to improve the efficiency of all vehicles is the rising tide that’s going to lift all boats. It’s going to lift the composites boat as well,” he said. There are, however, still some serious hurdles Magna and the NRC must overcome before the use of these composite parts becomes more mainstream, Mr. Harney admitted.
From Magna’s perspective, addressing the waste that is produced in the process of manufacturing them figures first and foremost.
One of the promises composite parts carry is that they could eventually reduce the overall number of individual parts needed by producing one solid piece in a mould, rather than dozens of little metal parts that need to be assembled, he said. Magna has had some success in this area by developing a composite front assembly for the Audi A8, which holds the headlights and cooling systems of the car. The award-winning technology allows Magna to produce one plastic part for the car rather than several small metal bits, cutting down on man-hours required to machine and assemble the component. But to make these composite components more common in the high-volume auto industry, Magna would have to eliminate a lot of waste that is produced in the process to make it more affordable, Mr. Harney said. He likened it to the introduction of aluminum parts to the auto industry decades ago.
Initially, aluminum components required a lot of machining — drilling, welding, etc. — after the component was forged in the foundry. This not only drove up the cost of producing these parts through man-hours, but also created a lot of waste in the process, Mr. Harney said.
There is a similar amount of waste in the labour-intensive approach to making composites used in the aerospace industry, for example, he said. “If you go to see Boeing, EADS or Bombardier, even the motorsport high-performance composite body structures, you’ll see waste in the process at the various steps in the value chain,” Mr. Haney said. He added that if composites are going to be the main frame of cars and trucks, the process will have to become a lot more efficient. The NRC hopes that through its partnership with Magna it might be able to find a more cost-effective way to produce these parts not only for the auto industry, but then for other sectors like aircraft manufacturing, said Martin Bureau, of the NRC’s Industrial Materials Institute. “What they know in automotive is cost-effectiveness, and that’s a huge need for people at the aerospace [manufacturers],” he said. “They’re facing huge challenges to lower their costs. At the same time they’re feeling a lot of pressure to bring in composites into their own structures. But that comes at a huge cost. That’s where cost-effectiveness is so important.”
But Mr. Bureau said there are other efforts in the works to try to reduce the cost of these composite parts, including the materials used.
Composite plastic parts are composed of essentially two parts: the fibres that reinforce them and the resins that act as the glue to hold them together, known as the matrix. While several luxury sports cars use the same sort of high-priced, high-performance synthetic carbon-fibre composites that are used on airplanes, those materials are cost-prohibitive for mainstream auto manufacturing. The NRC has an extensive history working in composite materials with manufacturers like Boeing and Bombardier to produce composite parts for their planes. And it has also worked with smaller Canadian-based aerospace-parts makers, like EADS’ Composites Atlantic Ltd. and Marquez-Transtech Ltdee.
The bulk of the cost associated with these high-performance carbon-fibre composites stems from the synthetic materials used to produce them, which are primarily derived from petroleum. As a result, to reduce the cost of the materials, scientist have increasingly been looking for alternatives.
This is where natural fibres, like the ones used by Mr. Ford in the Soybean Car, are coming into play. “We’re trying to bring those promises of raw materials and their uses to a commercial reality,” Mr. Bureau said. These so-called biofibres are much cheaper than the sort of synthetic fibres used to reinforce high-performance plastics in the aerospace industry. But they are lighter than alternatives, like glass, Mr. Bureau said. The Magna-NRC effort is also exploring ways to make the matrix that glues these fibres together from bio-derived sources, which brings all kinds of benefits, including making them biodegradable after an agent within the compound is triggered.
The one major limiting factor at this point, however, is finding an adequate supply of biofibres to meet the needs of an industry with such high volumes as the auto sector, he said.
From the field to the spinning plant, there just isn’t the proper infrastructure in place to support generating these fibres, Mr. Bureau said.
“While there’s a lot of great work being done with flax and hemp and other fibres, you could never afford or get enough to have them at this point to produce a product of good quality and high performance,” he added. This is the double-edged sword the use of plastics has brought to the auto industry, said David Tyerman, an analyst with Canaccord Genuity, who covers the auto-parts sector. While there are a tremendous number of advantages that come with them, there is also a great deal of difficulty in adapting them, he said. Past and present parts makers have fallen on that sword trying to integrate their use into mainstream manufacturing, from Husky Injection Molding Systems, Plastic Omnium, Dynamit Nobel and Textron. All have made salvos into plastics car parts with various degrees of success, Mr. Tyerman said. But the widespread adoption of composites has proven elusive for an industry with more than a century of institutional knowledge around steel, not plastics, he said.
Unless these and other hurdles can be overcome, Henry Ford’s dream of a Soybean Car may well be put out to pasture. “It has sort of been the Holy Grail of auto construction,” Mr. Tyerman said. “The challenge has always been in dealing with the physical properties of the plastics, which presumably is what this entity [with Magna and the NRC] is being set up to try and address.”
scdeveau@nationalpost.com
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