Last week I attended the Sierra Club Summit and had a chance to test drive some of the latest clean energy vehicles. The Honda folks were telling me that their compressed natural gas Civic GX is cheaper to fuel than their new Civic Hybrid. Natural gas is about $1.80 per gallon equivalent, so even though the GX doesn’t get as many miles per gallon (30), if gas stays above $3 a gallon, the 50 mpg Civic Hybrid is more expensive to fuel.
Honda says the GX emits less pollutants than hybrids, and the purchase price for the vehicles is comparable after tax incentives. Honda only recently started making the GX available to consumers after years of selling the cars to airport taxi services and government fleets.
You might say CNG sounds great, but where am I going to fuel up? If you live in an urban area, the odds are a CNG station isn’t so far away. For example, according to the DOE, there are more than 180 CNG stations in California (mostly around LA and SF), or for me in Portland, OR there eight places to fill up within 20 miles.
A CNG filling station can also be as close as your garage. The Phil from Fuelmaker enables you to tap into your natural gas line at home. The device can be a few thousand dollars to install depending on access to your gas line, but there are tax incentives starting in 2006 that reimburse you for most of the installation cost. The Phil is only available in California and Texas and a few cities, but the company is trying to get the permits to sell it in more locations.
