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Honda can be pretty cuthroat too

all honda love aside, that article gave me a headache 1/4th the way through...

from what i gathered. Honda owns or has power over "Fuelmaker." Fuelmaker owes Honda millions of dollars. Honda, with the power of something called a "numbered corporation" asked for the money owed to them.

 
Originally posted by: big man
honda has been making some very poor decisions as of late
Click to expand...

how do you figure this? most people have never heard of CNG, and honda basically does no marketing for their only CNG vehicle - the civic GX. in addition, the civic GX costs $10,000 more than a base civic and offers only 170 miles of drive range - i can do that in 3.5hrs going one way from home to school. hardly convenient at all or cost-effective.

i imagine there are plenty of reasons why honda has taken this course of action.
 
With no marketing they still had a waiting list of thousands to buy the car even at 10G a pop more which really its the same tehcnology as a propane vehicle, they are way cheaper so something about those numbers are wack.

I don't have a problem if they want to kill the product but I don't think it was demand http://blogs.edmunds.com/green...ral-gas-civic-gx-.html
 
NG is cheaper than gasoline 'usually' and is always cheaper where I live
NG is way cleaner and enviro inclined would love it for the same reason they buy Priuses
It isn't 10G 170 miles , its 7G and 240 miles range and the 7 G is before any gov't incentives so you can expect that difference to be further eroded.
 
Q: How far can the GX go on a full tank of natural gas?
A: The Civic GX has a EPA-estimated driving range of 170 miles
 
Originally posted by: desy
NG is cheaper than gasoline 'usually' and is always cheaper where I live
NG is way cleaner and enviro inclined would love it for the same reason they buy Priuses
It isn't 10G 170 miles , its 7G and 240 miles range and the 7 G is before any gov't incentives so you can expect that difference to be further eroded.
Click to expand...

i went to honda's own site:

a base civic is 15.X
a civic GX is 25.X

difference of 10k.

and as LTC has written above (also taken from honda's site, same as i did), it only has a 170 mile range
 
I got my information from the article linked
you've linked nothing

"Drawbacks to the GX include its cost - before federal and local clean car tax credits and incentives it runs about $7,000 more than the similarly equipped Civic LX sedan with a conventional gasoline engine - and limited range of about 240 miles per 8-gallon tank of compressed natural gas."

regardless then , if your numbers are correct there still is a wating list for an unadvertised car
 
I thought it was obvious that it came from Honda. It's mentioned several times at the Honda site.

Also, how much fuel fits in the tank varies quite a bit depending on how you fill it.

IIRC, if you slow fill it, which takes 16hrs from empty or overnight after 100 miles of driving, you get the most fuel in. If you fast fill it, you get less fuel in due to a "fast fill effect", whatever that is exactly. It has something to do with the pressure and temperature of the gas.

The warmer the fuel, the less will fit in the tank because it expands, and when you compress the fuel, it gets warmer, etc.

 
Is NG really cheaper, or is it subsidised?

What about road taxes? How are they paid if they are not part of the cost of the fuel? The Civic GX is just as hard on the roads as a gasoline powered Civic.

The car has to be sudsidised heavily, which should be all anyone needs to know.

The waiting list probably has more to do with the subsidy than with the car.
 
Yeah, that sucks. Honda and others need to step up CNG-fuelled vehicles. Hell, forklifts and other vehicles have been running on them for a while as they burn cleaner, etc. Hopefully I'll be able to convert my guzzler over to CNG one day as the way the price of gas goes, CNG would be more stable for me over the long term (as I already have a smaller conventional gasoline car).
 
the author of that article seems to be very sympathetic to those who lost their jobs working for CNG. It all has to do with survival in the market out there, and honda seems to only be doing whatever it takes to take care of themselves in this eco.
I guess working for "fuelmaker" was a highly risky job and those workers should of known their risks at that company.

i dont see a need for a civic GX in this market, people are only ready to buy hybrids now.
 
Yep sympathetic cause
You usually give severance if your going to shitcan somebodies job
This was a Honda company.
There were buyers lined up to buy this company but Honda chose to crush it instead of sell it.
Honda looks like they deliberately choked out the market espcially since there was demand for the actual cars that even overpricing it seemingly deliberately couldn't kill demand, propane vehicles which are the same essential technology can be had a lot cheaper.
They are manufacturing something, the law says you have to supply parts for 10 yrs which it seems they have no intention of doing, not really the mark of a good corporate citizen leaving existing Honda customers in the wind.
Which like I said is their choice
 
Nobody was buying Phill. So what was Honda supposed to do? It cost $6K and took a long time to fill your car. People evidently weren't very interested in having a slow fill system installed in their house.

Sounds silly to me anyway.

I'd rather just go to a filling station and get filled up fast, like gasoline powered cars do. Apparently that's what most folks preferred.

Honda was trying to sell the money losing company for a long time. No one ws interested in Phill or Fuelmaker, it seems.
 
"Honda?s conduct was further challenged during a much-vaunted push by T. Boone Pickens to proliferate natural gas vehicles. Pickens? company, Clean Energy, tried to purchase Fuelmaker for $17 million, which would break the shackles imposed on the CNG market. But at the last minute, the deal fell apart, reportedly because Honda refused to provide the ordinary financials required in due diligence."

Silly to you or not, many thousands were lined up for it and could have been much higher with the tiniest bit of effort or energy by Honda. So declare bankruptcy instead of sell it? stinks
 
Other articles report it differently.

What did Honda have invested? Was $17M a profit? A loss? What?

Honda must have had a good reason not to sell to the one buyer that finally expressed interest.

Besides, this does nothing to the CNG car market as far as I can see. This should have zero effect on CNG car buyers.

Few people who had a CNG car used a home filling station, apparently.

People will fill up just like they were doing for the most part anyway, at CNG stations, and plan their trips accordingly.

If Phill were selling well at all, we probably wouldn't be having this discussion.




 
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