Good! One more strike against petrolium!

Plenty of glycerin bioproducts from biodeisel manufacture to make foam from.

Generally any replacement of petroleum in new applications is great, because it helps cure people of the perception that there is anything special and essential about petroleum or mineral gas.

However, the press release doesn't mention anything about longevity. Often, biobased materials will deteriorate faster or more easily than their "more synthetic" counterparts. Good if you want biodegradeable; highly inappropriate for car parts. If a few custom parts in a car deteriorated in 12 years, you would drive people to throw away the whole car earlier and the environmental benefit would be negative. At least for clean cars that deserve to be kept around. The environmental community needs to ask this question, and not risk becoming the scapegoats for a new wave of built-in obsolescence.

Of course, you can always start with biomass feedstocks and make something identical to or better than the petroleum version, including on longevity. But you might be losing the benefits that motivated pioneering the switch (before the carbon tax comes).

Granted, it takes time to establish longevity for sure. But the experts surely have plenty of good tests and analytical tools these days.

"Soy is a very green, renewable resource," says Debbie Mielewski, technical leader for Ford's Materials Research & Advanced Engineering Department. "Using soy-based foam gives us the opportunity to conserve natural resources and reduce our environmental footprint." There are also other ways manufacturers go green, like producing for example a good Volkswagen Fuel Filter that helps lessen harmful air that car emits.