Apparently you can buy Phill again, at about $4500 plus installation. Converting your car or truck to use CNG will run $10,000 to $15,000. It hardly seems worth it if the cost to convert is $15,000 to $20,000.
You don’t convert a vehicle to run on CNG, you buy a factory-made vehicle. It’s 10 years away…
Today, natural gas at the wellhead sells for $2.75/MCF… On my last utility bill, I was paying $15/MCU which hasn’t changed much over the last two years and maybe longer…The price drop has not trickled down to consumers…
“You don’t convert a vehicle to run on CNG, you buy a factory-made vehicle. It’s 10 years away…”
The dude in the article converted his SUV to run on methane. It looks like the Civic NG is equivalent to the Civic EX; the price difference is $4600. That’s still a hefty piece of change.
You can convert a vehicle to run with propane gas assist, These guys are mainly diesel but could add a propane spare tire replacement tank for 3k for my trailblazer. Our fork truck at work from the 70’s I think is propane powered.
http://www.fireemup.com/
Propane is a lot less convenient that natural gas if you have natural gas service to your house already.
It hardly seems worth it if the cost to convert is $15,000 to $20,000
Probably not worth to convert…But might be worth it to buy your next new car that is all ready setup to run on CNG. The manufacturing costs to build one or the other should be insignificant. They’ve been building city buses to run on CNG for years.
“The manufacturing costs to build one or the other should be insignificant.”
Maybe. But Honda charges at least $4600 more for a NG Civic than a regular gas-powered Civic. No one else sells a new NG powered car in the USA.
Maybe. But Honda charges at least $4600 more for a NG Civic than a regular gas-powered Civic. No one else sells a new NG powered car in the USA.
That’s because of the limited number of sales.
If they sold MORE vehicles that ran on CNG then gas I guarantee you that cars running on gas would be more expensive.
If more and more vehicles run on CNG then the costs will start to come down. The problem is these painful years between now and then.
I don’t understand why ‘if they sold more vehicles…’ comment. A CNG vehicle is just like a gasoline vehicle, except for the addition of a large, expensive high pressure tank in place of the gas tank. There will always be an extra cost for that.
I don’t understand why ‘if they sold more vehicles…’ comment.
You’re not accounting for production costs. Production costs are greatly reduced when you build 100,000 vehicles of one type as compared to 10,000 of another type. I’ve sited several examples of this in the electronics field (i.e. Circuit boards). My company can buy these generic circuit boards that are almost 100 times more sophisticated then these specialty circuit boards at almost 1/10th the cost. The company that produces both boards at the same plant will make a little over 1 million of the generic circuit board…as compared to a few thousand of the specialty board. We don’t need all the functionality of the generic board…but we’re buying it anyways because it’s so much cheaper.
And it’s NOT just production…it’s materials/parts. You get reduced prices on parts if you buy 100,000 then if you buy 10,000.
I do understand that. It’s just that a 3000-4000 psi CNG tank will always cost more than the equivalent 0 psi gas tank.
I do understand that. It’s just that a 3000-4000 psi CNG tank will always cost more than the equivalent 0 psi gas tank.
But that’s only ONE part of the overall cost of building the car.
Let’s go back to my circuit boards…The parts alone on the generic circuit board are more then 5 times the cost of the specialty board (that we were using). Yet the generic board costs 1/10th the cost of the specialty board. When you produce hundreds of thousands compared to just a few thousand…the cost per unit drops drastically.
Will it work ALL the time…NO…But it does much of the time.
Mike, if done properly I agree. But it’s like auxilliary generators…I’ll bet there are far more hard-wired to the power box without a transfer switch than could be counted. There are a whole lot of people out there who think they’re a lot more capable of doing these things than they actually are.
Cars have constantly been known as dead as we know them. Planned obsolescence? I mean the hand crank died, points died, rebuild able fuel pumps died, replaceable cheap wheel bearings has died, etc. Now you need a specialized tool etc to do much work, and things are not repairable, only replaceable.