Reply #12: not gonna happen [View All]

[lithiumbomb]

Honda has been building these for about 10 years. And Ford has had CNG Crown Victorias for about the same amount of time, and virtually any car can be converted to CNG. The business model just isn't there. And ultimately, regardless of how wonderful these new, or old, technologies are, they will not be built in mass quantities if they are not somehow economically feasable. Toyota loses money on every Prius it sells, they're banking on people buying other Toyotas and the good publicity to bring in the money.

CNG vehicles are feasable for private and public fleets which have their own refueling facilities. And there's an obvious public benefit for moving urban diesel fleets over to CNG. But it's less efficient than gasoline, and much less so than diesel, so a private company and perhaps even the public are going to be hard to convince. The CNG civic gets 30/34 city/hwy, the base model gas DX gets 32/38. And costs about 7 grand less.

I think we'll see more development with alternate fuel vehicles once gasoline prices get _way_ up there. They're around 7-8 USD per gallon in europe and people are still in their cars, just much smaller and more efficient than what we americans tend to drive. I suspect what is probably the next radical thing we'll see beyond hybrids and super efficient gasoline engines is fuel cell electric cars, with the fuel cells powered by good old fashioned gasoline.
/babble