AW gets a long-term natural-gas Honda Civic

For all those wanting to save the universe, may we introduce the latest member of the AutoWeek green car fleet--a Honda Civic GX. The GX is a regular Civic in every respect but one--its 1.8-liter four-cylinder internal-combustion engine is powered solely by compressed natural gas.

The main benefit of this is that it achieves as close to zero emissions as you can get in a mass-produced passenger car. Honda says the GX makes 75 percent less smog-forming NOx than a comparable gasoline-powered model. Other sources list nonmethane hydrocarbon reductions of more than half, as well as the almost total elimination of carbon monoxide from the tailpipe. Some have compared the emissions of a natural-gas vehicle to those of an electric car's remote powerplant emissions figures—i.e. very, very little.

On top of that, the cost of natural gas is from 30 percent to 50 percent less than the cost of gasoline on a per-mile basis. The car drives just like a regular gasoline-powered Civic, if a little slower, and you don't need a tune up for the first 100,000 miles. And finally, in California, you can drive in the car-pool lane alone!

So why isn't everybody on the planet clamoring for one of these? Indeed, why in the 12 years that the model has been for sale hasn't Honda sold more than about 2,000 of them a year, the first several thousand of those to California fleets?

Because there are compromises, see? Some would say drawbacks. The cost of the CNG option on our Civic is listed on the window sticker at just less than $7,000. That's a heck of an option to check. The MSRP for our car was $18,925, but with the natural-gas setup, the sticker rose to $25,860.

And CNG isn't as easy to find as gasoline or even diesel. There is sufficient CNG infrastructure to support Civic GX sales in only four places in the United States: California, New York, Utah and Oklahoma. Even in tree-hugging Los Angeles, there are only a handful of places to refuel a natural-gas car. In some respects it's better to drive an electric car because at least there are electrical outlets everywhere that'll eventually get you back on the road. While there may be natural-gas pipes in every house, that gas comes out at about 6 psi, and the Civic GX has a 3,600-psi storage tank.

Speaking of the storage tank, it takes up about half the trunk, leaving you with only 6.0 cubic feet of luggage space.

And the tank limits that come with using natural gas cut your range almost in half, from close to 400 miles down to about 220 or 240 miles. In the week we've had it, so far we've gone 350 miles on the CNG equivalent of 10.039 gallons for a gasoline mpg equivalent of 34.86 mpg. We'll get into specifics of how you convert gaseous methane to an equivalent measure of liquid gasoline as soon as we figure out how the hell anybody does that.

But so far we like being able to cruise around SoCal in the car-pool lanes, and who doesn't want less pollution, not to mention being free of foreign oil? So let's see what life will be like with one of these, shall we?

By Mark Vaughn