“Someday you and I will see the day when auto bodies will be grown down on the farm,” Henry Ford said all the way back in 1934. He was referring to a soy milk-based plastic that his namesake company was experimenting with.
As prescient as the manufacturing visionary was, he swung and missed on this one. Not for lack of trying, though. Ford unveiled a prototype soybean car in August 1941, but America’s entry into World War II less than four months later snuffed out further development. Ford passed in 1947 and the hope for cars sprouting from soil died with him.
