Joel Clark Ford composite truck bed coal mine trial

Fiberglass people realized you can have tremendous strength, and you marry a protective adhesive coating — basically the plastic — with the fiberglass, and you end up making boats that don't corrode. What were the first fiberglass automobiles? The Corvette. Anybody can make a fiberglass $50,000 car; you can't make a $20,000 car out of fiberglass. In the 1990s we tried to start making truck beds out of plastics, or plastic resin molds and composites, and it turns out people love them. Joel Clark was working with Ford, I think, and they made some of these truck beds for pickup trucks. They gave them to a mine site to get a lot of wear on them, along with some steel truck beds. They were supposed to put them in service for six months and send them back so they could evaluate them at the research center. The coal companies didn't want to give back the resin mold composite beds, because they didn't crack — they were resilient. The steel dented and you couldn't close the tailgate, if you're dumping things into a pickup truck and abusing it like they do in a coal mine. Now what they do is they give you liners; it's still steel on the outside, and the reason is the plastic is still just more expensive.