That’s Alternate Fuel Vehicle, not Armored Fighting Vehicle – I’m not that cool.
With gasoline looking like it’s over $3 per gallon permanently, this is a good time to post this. I have been driving for eight years now, a Honda Civic GX, powered by Compressed Natural Gas (CNG). Naturally, mine is a 1999 model, not a 2008 shown in the link. Except for the fact it burns CNG, it is the equivalent of the DX model of the time, one of the less fancy ones.
It was my brother that got me into it. He’d bought the car in November 1998 and loved it, but wanted to get something a bit bigger. He bought a CNG Ford Crown Victoria and offered me the Honda at a good price. Maricopa county, where we live, has been under a mandate from the EPA to clean up the air and the state legislature had passed a bill to encourage people to switch over to CNG and propane-burning vehicles. Among other things, the state would pay 40% of the cost of a vehicle that could burn either.
Well, anybody with two brain-cells to rub together could figure what happened. All these yuppies bought giant pickups and SUVs, paid about $2,000 to have a conversion kit and a little dinky CNG tank installed, and got a big chunk of it paid for by the state. The legislators figured the bill would cost about $10-million the first year. Within three months, they were committed to some $430-million, and they pulled the plug, leaving a bunch of canceled orders and disappointed dealers in their wake. To top it all off, there’s nothing to ensure they use the CNG part at all; sales of fuel CNG have not increased appreciably.
Now the Honda was bought before all this happened, and as a used car it did not qualify anyway, but luckily another part of the bill was that the state would also pay to get a Fuelmaker installed. The Fuelmaker takes the pipeline natural gas, compresses it to 3600 psi, and injects it into the car. It’s a slow process, about eight hours from empty to full, but since it’s at home, who cares – you do it overnight. The line from the main in the alley had been removed by the previous residents of the house and to be restored, and the price of the Fuelmaker installation came to $6,800 and that was paid for by the state.
The car drives like any other: You get in, turn the key, and drive off. You don’t even have to fool around with glow plugs like you do some diesels. It’s incredibly clean. I have 179,000 miles on it and there is no trace of soot on the tailpipe; you can still the weld seam on the bottom of the pipe. The first couple times I took it in for an oil change, the guy stuck his head in to make sure there hadn’t been a mistake – the oil was coming out so clean he thought it was fresh. they got used to it, though and it does look kind of dark, now.
Advantages
It’s kind of nice knowing I’m not polluting as much when I drive around. Last time it was checked, the highest score was something less than 10% of maximum and most of the others were around two or three percent. The last two times I took it in for an inspection, they asked if it was ‘straight’ or could burn gasoline as well. When I told them the former, they waved me on through without even hooking up their gear (I still had to pay the $25, though).
It even more nice being able to tell Exxon and the Saudis to go screw themselves. So far as I know, we’re not importing any natural gas – it’s all domestic. The last time I bought gasoline was about nine months ago when I rented something to go on vacation with.
Needless to say, at $3+ per gallon, the nicest thing of all is that I’m paying less than $100 per month on my gas bill with a 45-mile round trip commute five times per week. Now, there are other costs involved, the electricity to compress the gas, and the compressor itself needs to be swapped out from time to time (the second time about two months ago to the tune of $1,120) but even factoring those costs in, I figure about $1.50 per GGE.
It’s peppy for a Civic. Natural gas has an octane rating of 130. Since they didn’t have to compromise to burn gasoline as well, Honda Motors took advantage of that fact to install a 16:1 compression ratio engine in it. It’s no muscle car, nor even a ricer, but it’ll out accelerate any of the stock four or six-banger sedans out there. A governor kicks in at 90mph which is good – things are getting a little floaty at that speed – but it gets up to that speed quick enough to suit me.
Lastly, I get to drive the diamond lane with only me in the car. My schedule is such it’s not an advantage used very often, but what the heck.
Disadvantages
The car is strictly a commute car. That’s why I had to rent last year. There are five public CNG stations here in the Phoenix metro area, and one more by the airport in Tucson. That’s it for all of Arizona. The car has a range of about 220 miles, a little more with the slow fill the Fuelmaker gives me. I can make it out a hundred miles east, north, or west before turning back, to allow a comfortable reserve. South, Tucson is in easy reach and with a fill up down there, another hundred miles range, enough to make it to Nogales and back up to Tucson. Other than that, I got no place to go. It’s frustrating that there’s no public station in Blythe because if there was, I could fill there which would get me to Indio (Where there is a station) and from there I could make it to the coast where there are stations from SanDiego to at least as far as Santa Barbara. With that missing link in Blythe, though, it’s no-go.
No luggage space (but see the paragraph above). To get the six GGE storage capacity for that 220 mile range, there are three pressure bottles horizontally underneath where regular Hondas have their gasoline tank, plus three more vertically in the trunk. If I was to go on a trip I could fit two smallish suitcases vertically between those bottles and the trunk lid, and that’s about it. Anything more would go in the back seat instead.
If you do run out of gas, you’re not walking the shoulder with a can. Naturally, I keep an eye on the filling so I’m not at risk or running out, but my nephew emptied the Vic once. He said it ran – then it didn’t. No warning coughs or anything so he had to be pushed to the shoulder to wait for a tow.
That’s about all I can think of off the top of my head on the subject. Any questions?