I keep forgetting to talk about this in one of my posts but finally remembered. On our trip from Jackson, WY to Colorado, our route took us through Utah. We had stopped to fill up at a Flying J and noticed that the pump the guy across from us was using was really loud. It wasn’t till he was almost done pumping that Linda noticed the nozzle was different. She tried to ask the guy questions about it but he didn’t speak English. He was driving a pick-up truck and turns out he was filling it with natural gas. I figured it was a municipal vehicle as you often see buses and municipal vehicles say that they are powered “by natural gas”. Since we couldn’t ask him anything that couldn’t be answered with hand signals, we were getting ready to pull out. A lady pulled up in a car in the exact same spot, after the truck had left, and she also began to fill up with natural gas.
We asked her about it and found out it’s her personal vehicle and it’s pretty common to find them in Utah. According to this interesting article, Utah 
was the first state in the country to express broad consumer interest in running their cars on natural gas. We asked this woman what the fuel efficiency is on natural gas. She said that natural gas is running around $1.25/gallon and she has a 5 gallon tank in her car. She figured she got about 30 miles to the gallon ! Wow…why aren’t more states putting in natural gas pumps ? According to the article I found, people are searching the internet for natural gas cars for sale to bring back to Utah. There is more demand for vehicles than what is available on car lots. Honda Civic GX is the only manufacturer of natural gas vehicles for ordinary consumers. Honda’s web site touts fuel mileage of 28 mpg/city and 39/highway. The car also has zero emissions…how cool is that! Starting price is $15,805 if you can find one. They are selling like hotcakes. Can’t imagine why when gas prices are $3.61 (least that’s what we paid yesterday to fill the trike). Hey, President Obama…take a trip to Utah and see what Utah is doing to break the grip on foreign oil.
1 comment:
We did some test cars with CNG back in the 80's and they did OK, but had some side effects that our test customers didn't like. One and most important...they didn't like cold start and warm up driveablity. We had to start them with gasoline and switch over when warmed up. NG doesn't have the BTU of gas and therefore lack power. Very clean tailpipe operator though. Super long oil change intervals. I'm sure many of those bugs are all worked out. Just FYI rockin'
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