New Honda runs on natural gas

Huh. Cool.

As a brief side note (before any notes on the main point have been added) our Civic was running at roughly 50 miles to the gallon on our recent drive across the country (in ideal conditions, driving for twelve hours at a time, behind a truck that couldn't exceed 70 mph).

Wow! 50! I get around 30 in town in my civic.

The article says they've been putting a few thousand of these cars out every year for several years now.

No reason not to, except that fueling up is a bit of a hassle, especially if you stray from your home.

(Yep, 50. I couldn't believe it myself -- usually it's only 32 to 36 or so...)

Your honda runs better than mine.

Yeah, I wonder where you can fill up. You need to buy a $2k device to allow you to fill up from your home.

$3K more for the NG powered car and then another $2K for the adapter and then a few $$ more for someone to come and hook the adapter up. Ugh! I HATE that!

Unfortunately, that $5K+ difference up front is gonna kill their sales. Add on the additional interest on the $3K in the loan and the reduced operating costs start to diminish too. People will look at the up-front costs and shy away from it.

I REALLY wish someone would come out with a NG powered car at the same price the matching gasoline powered car goes for. That would give people a real alternative with no excuses.

I had a propane power Ford F-150 back in the late 1980s and I LOVED it! I had bought it used from a propane dealer but it ran way clean. The oil was still clean after running it for 5,000 miles. Much more efficient.

What kind of range did it have? Propane's a little bulky, ain't it?

My previous employer kept the entire fleet of pickups on propane. Actually, it was a dual use conversion, so they could use gasoline, which was recommended from time to time. We had bulk propane tanks in the yard and total operating costs were lower, probably because we were skating by without state and federal taxes on the fuel. Each truck had a truck tool box and a propane tank in the bed, which almost entirely defeated the purpose of having a pickup truck. Natural gas requires higher pressure to be liquified, so I would expect the tanks to be heavier. They did run cleaner.

patio - Mine had the dual fuel setup as roger described. I didn't have a toolbox in the bed but there was a 100 lb LP gas tank that straddled the front of the bed as a cross-bed toolbox would. It was a long bed F-150 so with the tank in it it had the useable space of a short bed.

If I filled the 100lb tank I could run for about 900 miles before I'd run out of propane - slightly under 3x the range of the standard 25 gal. gasoline tank.