Compressed Natural Gas car
 

I was in San Jose over the weekend attending my older brother's wedding. It was a great weekend, and I took a bunch of pictures at the ceremony, during side trips to the Redwoods and the beach with my family. But I won't bore you with those.

Instead, I'm going to bore you with pictures of his "new" car. I had mentioned this car in another thread a few weeks ago. He bought a used Honda Civic on E-Bay from a fleet operated in Pennsylvania. He had it trucked to him in California. The car runs on compressed natural gas. He had told me that it runs just like a regular car, and this weekend I got to find out if that's true. As it turns out, it pretty much is true.

The major downside to this car is that there are very few places where you can fill it up and it has a range of "only" 200 miles. Fortunately for him, one of those places in the bay area is literally right off an exit along the highway he uses for his commute. PG&E has a facility for their own fleet that they let the general public use.

So here's a picture of my brother and his car at the pump outside the PG&E building in the Mountain View area. Notice that green NGV sticker on the side? That's the main reason he bought it. He can use the HOV lanes in his area, even if he's in the car alone.

He's got a gas card that PG&E gave him, and the bills get sent to him automatically each month.

The gas cap is designed to have the fuel nozzle latch securely onto it. It's got to, at 3600 PSI pressure.

You retract this blue sleeve, push the nozzle in place, and let the blue sleeve spring back and complete the air tight seal with the car's tank. Then you turn the nozzle to "on" and turn the pump on.

These LED gauges give you the gallon equivalent, but don't tell you what you are paying. I guess it's a surprise at the end of the month. He says it cost about $12 to fill up, and the tank lasts for about 200 miles.

The real gauge to watch is the pressure gauge. The car's tank fills to 3600 PSI, so the pump shuts down once it reaches that pressure. Only takes a minute or so.

Then you turn off the nozzle and make sure the pump is off, and the pump vents the small amount of pressurized gas that was in the hose up this pipe and right into the atmosphere.

The whole process of filling the tank make sounds that are similar to filling your tires with air, except without all the leaking air noises. The nozzle seal is air tight to 3600 PSI.

The Civic trunk is even smaller on this car. Can't put too much in here.

Under the hood, the only change I could see to the engine was this blue regulator right next to the valve cover. The label says it drops the pressure down to 36.3 PSI before it goes into the engine. The label also says the max input pressure is 193PSI, so there has to be another regulator somewhere to drop the tank pressure down from 3600PSI to 193PSI here.

The exhaust system has this thing in it, upstream from the regular muffler. It looks like a muffler to me and not a catalytic converter, but what do I know?

And finally, here are the stickers I found under the hood.


Overall, it's just like a regular small car.

My Exploder gets 15 mpg. I just paid $3.79 a gallon today. That's 25.6 cents per mile.

His is 6 cents per mile based on $12 for 200 miles. My meager calculation skills tell me that he's getting somewhere near 60 mpg gasoline equivalent if all the other figures are correct.

Color me envious.

Yeah, well, I can't verify these numbers. It's all hearsay. But I don't think he's trying to BS me.

Maybe he pays $12 each time he fills it up, but he fills it up (tops off the tank) whenever it drops below half a tank. There are few places to fill the tank, and if it were my car, I'd make sure the tank never got too low. Otherwise you would be stranded. (It has a standard looking fuel gauge in the dash.)

So maybe the $12 is what it costs to fill half a tank.

Either way, the mileage is good, and he gets to use the HOV lanes, so his commutes are much faster, and it's better for the environment.

glatt - that's great. Thanks for posting those pictures.

Did you get to drive it?

What happens in January 2016?

The sticker says it has a catalyst so maybe that thingy is a converter?

I guess any car fire would be a total, the firemen wouldn't want to get near it.
Getting rear-ended could be nasty too. :unsure:

He shouldn't worry about running out of gas. A "Taco Bean Burrito Deluxe Supreme" should do the trick... Anyway... Good for him.

Very cool car Glatt. Tailpipe emissions are pretty clean, yes?

Yes. It performed as well as any other car small car I've driven. I took it over the mountain highway to Santa Cruz, and it kept up with the traffic going 65 up the mountain with two adults and two kids. It has an automatic transmission, and I'm used to a stick shift. It kept downshifting when I wouldn't have chosen to do that, but that always happens to me when I'm driving a rental I'm not familiar with.

I was wondering the same thing, but my brother said that it was less of a problem than you might think. When a regular car gets in an accident, the gas tank can rupture and then you have puddles of flammable gasoline lying around. If this tank (or more likely the gas lines because the tank is very tough) get ruptured, the natural gas blows away in the wind, and the fire danger dissipates.

Edit: the warning label says not to put it in an oven to dry the paint, so there is clearly a danger with heat. Fires would be bad.

Yes. The emissions from this car are the same as the emissions from the stove in my kitchen, and that vents right into the living area of my house. The exhaust still contains things like CO2, but the nastier things like sulfer are much lower than in a regular car.

Thanks for the pix.

Here's an article about home CNG compressors that can refuel one of these overnight.

for about $3,500 but perhaps there are some incentives offered in the Bay Area? Oh, and a non-all electric home...