Fighting Pain at the Pump, Honda Joins with Clean Energy to Provide $3,000 Fuel Cards to New Civic Natural Gas Vehicle Customers

Honda just released an incentive, a big one, for those interested in buying the Civic Natural Gas. American Honda has an alliance with Clean Energy Fuels to provide a debit card pre-loaded with $3,000 that can used at Clean Energy fueling stations around the country. Another perk, for those living in California, is the ability to drive a 2012 Civic Natural Gas Vehicle in the High Occupancy Vehicle carpool lanes through January 1, 2015.

Honda says that the natural gas vehicle offers fuel savings up to 40 percent compared to a typical gasoline-powered subcompact car with its 31 miles per gallon combined EPA rating. Natural gas was costing customers $2.05 per equivalent gasoline gallon in July, according to the most recent Deptartment of Energy data. While not covered in its press release (see below), there are other considerations that car shoppers should research, such as:

• Finding a natural gas station: Clean Energy doesn't state the specific number of public fueling stations that there are in the US, but the numbers are limited. A lot of these stations are behind locked gates at government and business fleet facilities, airports, and bus and utility vehicle gas pumps. Looking over Clean Energy's map, it looks like there are about 180 public natural gas stations, about forty percent of them in Southern California.
• Range limitations: The regular Honda Civic sedan has a gas tank that can hold up to 13.2 gallonsand has a combined city/highway mileage rating of 32 miles per gallon for the automatic transmission version. That would mean it could travel 422 miles on a tank of gasoline. Honda gives the Civic Natural Gas a range estimate of 220 miles. Part of the reason for this conservative estimate is that different stations refill CNG differently, and ambient temperature has an effect on how much gas can make it into the tank. There's also a limit to how much natural gas the pressurized tank can hold.
• Price comparison: Natural gas is appealing for those interested in reducing their out-of-pocket fuel expense, with a $2.05 per equivalent gasoline gallon the number cited by Honda, compared to the current national average for gasoline at about $3.80 a gallon. The downside is that the Civic Natural Gas is the most expensive version of the Civic, with its sticker price starting at $27,065 after destination.

So, the $3,000 fuel card is appealing, but it makes sense to look before you leap. Does it make sense for you?



Source: Honda

Honda Offers $3,000 Fuel Card With Civic NGV Purchase

As the only natural gas car you can buy from a major automaker, you would think the Honda Civic NGV would have the market for alternative fuels cornered. But Honda executives are resorting to some classic tricks to move these vehicles off of dealership lots, including offering a $3,000 fuel card with the purchase of any Civic NGV.

The $3,000 fuel card can only be used at one of the 150 Clean Energy CNG stations around America (of which 40 are in California). Granted, California is the largest car market, and gas prices have crept over $4.50 a gallon in many places in the Golden State. With CNG prices hovering around $2.00 a gallon, you can save a lot of money, and the Honda Civic NGV even won the coveted Green Car of the Year award.

The Honda Civic NGV also gives drivers access to California’s coveted HOV lanes. Alas, with a starting MSRP of $26,305 (plus a $790 destination fee), the Honda CIvic NGV is the most expensive Civic model in the lineup. The Civic CNG also makes due with less power and less range, around just 200 miles per tank of natural gas. Also, home refilling can take up to a full day, and the CNG filling systems cost thousands of dollars, leaving some customers to rely on just a handful of public fueling stations.

While many pundits and politicians are touting CNG as the replacement for petrol, consumers seem wary. Nobody wants to get stuck with the 21st century equivalent of Betamax, after all. Throwing $3,000 of free fuel on the hood of a new car doesn’t exactly reek of confidence.

Source: Carscoop

Want to Buy A Natural Gas Vehicle? Be Prepared for a Detour

By the end of this year, Honda says it will have more than 200 dealers certified to sell the 2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas across the U.S. 

Much cheaper than regular gasoline and cleaner-burning, many states offer incentives to encourage drivers to make the switch to natural gas. 
But there’s one problem: finding somewhere to fill up. 

Find a station

At the moment, there are around 930 natural gas filling stations in the U.S. Of those, more than half are open to the public, but many more are private filling stations ran by local businesses and governments exclusively for fleet use.

The number of stations varies greatly from state to state, with prices per gallon also varying dramatically. Interestingly, Oklahoma has a large number of natural gas filling stations, and also some of the cheapest natural gas in the U.S. By contrast, South Dakota has none.

Take a detour

As a consequence of the difference in popularity of natural gas from state to state, distances between natural gas stations can vary greatly, as AOL Autos senior editor Scott Burgess recently discovered. 

2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas, El Segundo, CA, Nov 2011

During a 600-mile trip from New York City to Detroit in Bi-fuel 2012 Ford F-250CNG, Burgess took a 94-mile detour just so he could fill up with natural gas. 

Range anxiety

Burgess was lucky. In bi-fuel vehicles like the fleet-only 2012 Ford F-250 pickup, there’s a backup gasoline tank, meaning you can drive on gasoline or natural gas, essential if you’re traveling somewhere without natural gas refueling stations. But natural gas vehicles, like the 2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas, ONLY have a natural gas tank.

 That, as our own John Voelcker found out in 2011, can lead to some range anxiety. For reference, the Civic Natural Gas has a real-world range of 150 to 180 miles per fill. While that’s more than the range of most plug-in cars per charge, electric car owners do at least know there’s normally an outlet nearby they can use to refuel in an emergency.

Or pump your own

2013 Chevrolet Silverado 2500 HD bi-fuel (natural gas & gasoline) pickup truck

You may think we’re predicting doom and gloom for the natural gas car, but we’re not. In some states, where natural gas stations are plentiful, a natural gas car can make a good purchase if you’re looking for a green car with a range larger than that of an all-electric car. California, for example, offers natural gas perks similar to electric car drivers, including purchase incentives and single-occupant use of HOV lanes. 

Like electric cars however, the best refueling solution for a natural gas car could be the installation of a home refueling system. Using around 800 watts of electricity, these systems take an existing natural gas domestic supply and compress it, enabling you to refill your car at home every day. 


A tough sell

At the moment, because of the challenges in refueling them, natural gas cars represent a tiny proportion of private vehicles on the roads of the U.S. today. With Honda keen to encourage car buyers to make the switch to Natural gas and more dealers becoming certified to sell the car, that may slowly change over the coming months. But with Honda recommending any dealer wanting to sell its Civic Natural Gas being less than 20 miles from a public natural-gas fueling station, we think that change will happen (if at all) very slowly indeed.



Source: Green Car Reports

 

The CNG Civic GX Returns!

The CNG Honda Civic GX has returned to the Chicago Auto Show this year. Named the 2012 Green Car of the Year by the Green Car Journal, the unassuming sedan looks just like any other 2012 Civic. The only indication that this is not a car running on standard gasoline is the CNG badge on the back, proudly but quietly claiming that this car is one of the cleanest-burning in the world.

CNG vehicles (NGVs) are still somewhat of a niche, mostly due to natural gas stations being a little hard to find (the US Department of Energy does have a locator application to find alternative fuel stations), but natural gas burns very cleanly. Just about the only way to be greener with your vehicle is to get something purely electric and then power it with solar panels alone.

In addition to being much cleaner-burning than gasoline-powered cars – the Civic GX has an AT-PZEV (Advanced Technology Partial Zero-Emission Vehicle) rating as certified by CARB – the mileage is great. The Civic GX has a 31mpg EPA rating (combined – 27mpg city and 38mpg highway, gasoline-gallon equivalent). The actual volume of fuel burned, since it’s natural gas, is a little higher, and that brings us to the one sacrifice that an NGV driver will be making.

The 2012 CNG Civic has not solved the problem of the 2011 CNG Civic, which is namely this:

There’s very little trunk space, since the fuel tank has to be quite a bit larger than a standard Civic. On the other hand, low emissions plus good mileage plus eligibility for energy efficiency incentives more than make up for a lack of trunk space in my book. The Civic GX is available in California, New York, Utah, or Oklahoma.

Source: Gas2.0

Jay Leno Shows Off Hand Built Magnolia Special Natural Gas Roadster

We may be having a natural-gas moment.

Nexrt week, we'll test-drive a 2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas, the only factory-built passenger car sold to retail buyers that runs on compressed natural gas. We drove its predecessor, the Honda Civic GX, last year.

Now noted auto collector and fan Jay Leno (he has a second job, we hear) has done an episode of Jay Leno's Garage on the remarkable hand-built "Magnolia Special" natural-gas roadster.

The featured car was hand-built in Thirties retro racer style by New Orleans designer (and crazy man) J.T. Nesbitt. As our colleague Kurt Ernst says, Nesbitt is "our kind of crazy."

After building the car, he drove it from New York City to Los Angeles, a trip of 2,500-plus miles, in a mere 89 hours. That included a cold night spent by a campfire waiting for a supposedly 24-hour natural-gas fueling station in North Carolina to open up in the morning.

The Magnolia Special was entirely hand-fabricated, much of it by Nesbitt himself. He formed the fenders out of metal sheet on an English wheel, and cast other items in his New Orleans shop, Bienville Studios.

The motive power is a 4.2-liter Jaguar straight-six engine, which he converted to run on the gaseous fuel. It is supplied from a total of five tanks holding compressed natural gas (CNG), giving it a range of roughly 600 miles (range being the weak spot of Honda's Civic NGV line).

The car is street-legal and, despite its looks, has fully modern brakes, lighting, and the rest. Nesbitt says it's run reliably for more than 5,000 miles thus far.

There are fewer than 1,000 natural-gas fueling stations in the U.S. currently open to the public, so careful route planning and navigation was required, even with a 600-mile range.

Watch the episode below, and then tell us: Doesn't it make you want to drive a natural-gas retro roadster across the country too?

EcoFriendly LLC Develops Home Natural Gas Pump

Natural gas vehicles aren't particularly common on U.S. roads, and with relatively cheap and plentiful gasoline, it's fairly clear why. Pumps are few and far between and only the 2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas gives private buyers an option over gasoline or diesel.

If you had the chance to fill at home instead of hunting down a suitable pump, you might be more tempted. Ecofriendly LLC, run by Paul Gianakas, gives you just such an option.

Ecofriendly installs natural gas fueling stations at homes and businesses. The system compresses natural gas from your home's service line into the CNG that natural gas vehicles use. The unit has a leak detector to ensure it immediately shuts down as a safety measure.

Speaking with the Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Mr Gianakas revealed he believes in the technology so much that he sold his classic El Camino and Mustang to fund the business startup and now has one of his own pumps in his garage, ready to fill his Honda Civic GX.

It's also proving cheap to run. The gas is costing him about $1.15 per "gasoline gallon equivalent", and with prices knocking on the door of $4 per gallon, the home-filling looks more tempting than ever. And as electric car owners will tell you, there's a certain smugness to driving straight past every gas station.

The grass isn't completely green on the other side, though. Initial costs are high - a home pump from Ecofriendly costs between $5,000 and $7,000, so you'd have to do a lot of miles before the savings are recouped.

Then, if you want to convert your current car rather than settle for the $26,905 Civic, professional conversion can cost as much as $12,000 before any applicable government tax credits.

As for Paul Gianakas and his business partner Bob Alvin, they expect Ecofriendly to turn a profit by the end of the year, but Mr Gianakas thinks that an increase in the number of regular pumps at gas stations will help improve the market for CNG cars and for his home-filling stations.

Most natural gas for transport is still used commercially in buses and vans, but if you're interested in natural gas cars then the 2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas is out soon. We've driven its predecessor, the Honda Civic GX. If you didn't already know it was a natural gas-powered vehicle, you'd not know otherwise.



Source: Green Car Reports

Look For Natural Gas Vehicle Sales To Start Picking Up

Which alternate vehicle or fuel do you know least about?

You've almost surely heard about hybrids. You may have seen ethanol, even biodiesel, debated in the news. And if you read this site, you're likely to know that cars that plug into grid power to recharge their battery packs are now on sale from Chevrolet and Nissan, among others.

But did you know that Honda has been selling a natural-gas powered version of the Honda Civic for more than a decade?

Natural-gas vehicles exist in most parts of the world--more than 12 million of them, in fact--but they're concentrated in Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, especially in countries without adequate gasoline refineries like Iran and Pakistan.

In North America, though, they're confined almost entirely to fleets--and most natural-gas vehicles are larger than passenger cars, including buses, municipal repair vehicles, and other heavy trucks.

2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas

The problem is the lack of refueling stations. After a century, gasoline is ubiquitous--and so is electricity. But natural gas fueling stations are few and far between, though they do exist.

Nonetheless, according to a pricey recent report by Pike Research, sales of NGVs will grow from 1.9 million a year today to as much as 3.2 million per year by 2016.

That's still only a fraction of the 80 million or so vehicles built globally, and that 12 million total is a tiny percentage of the world's roughly 1 billion vehicles.

Pike Analyst Dave Hurst updated his predictions in a recent blog post, suggesting that oil prices are likely to continue rising over the long term, despite short terms dips and spikes.

2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas

That will only increase the running-cost advantage of NGVs, which can cut per-mile costs in half despite their pricier window sticker price tags.

But they'll remain a niche product for passenger vehicles, with the bulk of the growth coming from corporate and government fleets. The fleet share of total NGV sales, in fact, will rise from 59 percent to 65 percent, according to Hurst.

And most of that growth will happen outside the U.S.

Honda plans a limited nationwide rollout of its 2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas (the new name for the model previously called the Civic GX), which it has priced at $26,905 with delivery.

But that car is still likely to find its best reception in places that have lots of native natural gas: California, Texas, Utah, New York, and parts of the Midwest).

We'll be driving a new 2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas in a few weeks. If you have questions about NGVs, or about that car in particular, please let us know what they are.

Source: Green Car Reports

New Honda 2012 Civic Natural Gas goes on sale 18 October at Honda dealers in 35 states, up from 4

2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas. Click to enlarge.

The all-new 2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas (formally known as the Civic GX), the only dedicated natural gas-powered passenger vehicle manufactured and sold in the US, will go on sale at qualified Honda dealerships nationwide on 18 October with a Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) starting at $26,155.

To support growing consumer interest in alternative-fuel vehicles, American Honda is expanding its network of US dealers which are qualified to sell and service the Civic Natural Gas to retail customers—expanding sales to 200 dealers in 35 states. Previously, retail sales of the natural gas-powered Civic had been limited to four states: California, New York, Utah and Oklahoma.

The Civic Natural Gas offers multiple benefits including significantly reduced operating costs compared to gasoline and lower fuel costs, with natural gas purchased at public fueling stations historically costing about 30% less than gasoline on a gasoline-gallon-equivalent basis.

As an alternative-fuel vehicle with extremely low smog-forming emissions, the Civic Natural Gas currently qualifies for a state-issued decal allowing single-occupant access to High-Occupancy Vehicle (HOV) “carpool” lanes in California and several other states. The Civic Natural Gas engine produces almost zero smog-forming emissions and is the cleanest internal-combustion vehicle certified by the EPA (Tier-II, Bin-2 and ILEV certification as of August 2010).

The Civic Natural Gas is recognized by the state of California as an Advanced Technology Partial Zero Emissions Vehicle (AT-PZEV) by meeting SULEV emissions standards and warranting its emissions durability for at least 150,000 miles or 15 year (in California and those states that have adopted California’s ZEV regulations). Natural gas, as a lower carbon fuel, emits 25% less CO₂ emissions than gasoline when used to power an internal combustion engine.

2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas engine bay with 1.8-liter i-VTEC dedicated natural gas 4-cylinder engine. Click to enlarge.

A modified 1.8-liter, four-cylinder engine found in the Civic Sedan and Coupe models powers the new Civic Natural Gas. A 5-speed automatic transmission is standard equipment.

The Civic Natural Gas engine incorporates features to operate exclusively on compressed natural gas. The compression ratio is increased to 12.7:1, compared to 10.6:1 in the Civic Sedan’s gasoline-powered engine. Exclusive fuel injectors, intake and exhaust valves, and valve seats are designed to accommodate the unique properties of natural gas. Stronger connecting rods and crankshaft as well as special pistons are used to accommodate both the higher compression ratio of the engine and octane rating of the fuel.

The Civic Natural Gas has its 3600-psi fuel tank located between the rear wheels. The safety-engineered, aluminum-lined composite fuel tank can contain the gasoline-gallon equivalent (GGE) of 7.8 gallons of gasoline when filled with CNG to 3600 psi.

The Civic Natural Gas has an EPA-rated city/highway/combined fuel economy of 27/38/31 mpg (8.7/6.2/7.6 L/100km), gasoline-gallon equivalent (gge).Compared to the previous model, city fuel economy is up by 12.5% and highway fuel economy is improved by 5.5%. Additionally, the 2012 Civic Natural Gas achieves a 10.7% improvement in combined fuel economy and range. The new model also incorporates the Honda ECO Assist system, a technology that can enhance efficient vehicle operation at the touch of a button, while also providing visual feedback to the driver to promote and confirm a more efficient driving style.

Building on the successful packaging of the previous generation Civic, the passenger volume of 94.6 cubic feet increases by 3.7 cubic feet, and gains have also been made in front shoulder room (+2.9 inches) and rear legroom (+1.6 inches).

For safety, a wide variety of standard equipment includes Honda’s exclusive Advanced Compatibility Engineering (ACE) body structure for enhanced frontal collision energy management and vehicle-to-vehicle crash compatibility. ACE enhances frontal collision energy management through a network of load bearing structures in the front of the vehicle. Additional standard safety equipment includes Vehicle Stability Assist (VSA) that integrates with the new Motion-Adaptive electric power steering (EPS) system; dual-stage, multiple-threshold front airbags; front side airbags with occupant position detection system (OPDS); side curtain airbags; and a 4-channel anti-lock braking system (ABS) with Electronic Brake Distribution (EBD) and Brake Assist.

Standard equipment on the 2012 Civic Natural Gas includes the new “intelligent” Multi-Information Display (i-MID) that provides a platform for integration of vehicle information and compatible personal electronics with a driver-oriented 5-inch color LCD display and intuitive steering wheel controls. All models also come equipped with Bluetooth HandsFreeLink for wirelessly connecting compatible mobile phones and a USB audio interface for compatible music players.

The redesigned 2012 Civic Natural Gas can now be equipped with the Honda Satellite-Linked Navigation System featuring an exclusive database of publicly accessible Compressed Natural Gas (CNG) refueling stations across the United States.

All Civic Natural Gas models are produced at Honda Manufacturing of Indiana (HMIN). The 2012 Honda Civic is covered by a 3-year/36,000-mile New Car Limited Warranty; a 5-year/60,000-mile powertrain limited warranty, and a 5-year/unlimited-mile corrosion limited warranty.

Source: Green Car Congress