Usually when you hear about wood being used in a car's interior, it's a fancy solid hardwood used to class up the dashboard. On Ford's 2014 Lincoln MKX, however, a relatively new wood-based composite material will be used in place of heavier, less eco-friendly fiberglass.
The material, known as Cellulose Reinforced Polypropylene (and marketed as Thrive), incorporates cellulose fibers "extracted from trees grown in sustainably managed forests" instead of the traditional glass fibers. It reportedly offers tensile and impact strengths close to those of fiberglass, while also being about six percent lighter, having a lower carbon footprint, and utilizing more renewable ingredients.
The Ford Motor Company has used the material in prototypes before, but this is said to be its first application in a production vehicle. That said, it will be confined to a fairly small part of the car – the floor console armrest substrate, which is a structural component inside the center console armrest. If all goes well, however, it could be used more extensively in future models.
The Weyerhaeuser timber company and auto parts supplier Johnson Controls collaborated with the Ford-owned Lincoln Motor Company on the project.
Source: Lincoln Motor Company
Traditionally the German companies haven't done wood interiors all that well- their wood seems to look a lot like wood-effect plastic film such as that used on cheap furniture.- although admittedly better than the odd green-tinted wood-effect fascia trim on a Mk 1 Ford Focus Ghia I once owned.
Wood interiors is one of the few things we Brits tend to do better than most others, IMHO.
It is all in the name. Cellulose Reinforced Polypropylene.
Cellulose has little to do with a wood-grain type look, or wood interiors (oh, note that most "Wood" interior material is actually mostly(by mass and volume) RESIN.). It is merely the fibres within wood (and other plants) which provides the tensile strength of wood in nature and can be used for engineered materials in the future.
Don't be offended by the term composite, a TREE is composed of a composite, containing cellulose (fibre) and lignin(matrix). Bone too (as in the bone in your leg) is a composite of collagen (fibre) and hydroxyapatite(matrix).
Polypropylene is a Thermoplastic which is recyclable.
Most of the Resins used in composites are thermosets, meaning that they can't be softened by heating (ie melted) due to the crosslinks, eliminating most recycling uses (though they can be incinerated and thereby provide energy in their demise, or pulverised and used in the plastics industry as a filler).
Using a thermoplastic allows (down) recycling, and reuse of the plastic once the car is scrapped.
Use of cellulose (if it actually has a higher tensile strength to glass will be interesting, sure it should have a lower density than glass.) as a renewable resource (processing may add to environmental cost though) saves using a non-renewable resource to make glass-fibres, and avoids the energy intensive polymers used to create carbon fibre etc...
It is about time to make larger-scale use of thermoplastics in the composite industry and if the fibre is a renewable resource and has better engineering properties (at least compared to fibreglass), it may be a good win. This may still not put the other reinforcing fibres out of business, as aramid and carbon fibre/nanotubes are likely to still be vastly stronger than cellulose when used in composites.
Good to see new engineering materials entering the mainstream.
To add Ford used Hemp Fibers to do the same things in the Model T so not really new.
Hemp is much stronger than pulp too just they made it illegal so Dupont wouldn't have to compete with it vs Dupont's new synthetic fibers then.
Not sure why anyone thinks composites are not environmentally great. They can be made from biomass, etc for the resins and sand, biomass for the fibers and all can be make with RE power.
To recycle just heat it up and use the gasses produced to make more resin or syn fuels, etc. Plus takes much less energy to make say composite cars, they last a very long time and as they weigh less they get 2x's the EV/Gas mileage.
So let's get hemp back into our cars, home heaters, power generators, clothing that cost a fraction of the things it replaces. And it grows like a weed ;))