A fully wooden car, the Toyota Setsuna, was displayed at the 2016 Milan Design Week.
I was led to this by an article in NewScientist (16 March 2019, paywall) on the replacement of concrete and steel with processed wood:
… as cities grow, the potential of CLT [cross-laminated timber] does too. Around 65 per cent of the urban infrastructure that will be needed in 2030 has yet to be built. If it is constructed with concrete and steel, we have little chance of keeping temperatures down. CLT does not eliminate the old materials completely, but reduces them by up to 80 per cent. “We still use concrete for foundations,” say Shah. “But a wood building is about a third of the weight of a steel and concrete building. That means we require less deep foundations so it reduces the amount tremendously.” Wood also improves a building’s insulation, further cutting its carbon footprint.
In the not-too-distant future, wood could even be used in place of glass in windows. A few years ago, scientists at the Wallenberg Wood Science Center in Stockholm, Sweden, invented a way to extract the pigments from wood. The result was a transparent material that can be used like glass, but with better insulating properties – another small step toward a zero-carbon future.
They even go on to observe lasers have been built using deconstructed wood. Long time readers will recall I’ve talked about wooden buildings made from CLT, so this is all very interesting. Do we really have the wood-growing resources to switch to an economy in which CLT is the primary construction material world-wide? It’ll be interesting to see.
