The Civic GX NGV is pretty high tech - it runs on compressed natural gas. It's quite economical and has clean emissions, too (Senior Editor O'Dell has an upcoming summary). But this Civic NGV is too, uh, normal.

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Phill home CNG unit has cut fuel costs 30%, and best is yet to come.

When we posted our methodology for computing fuel economy in the natural gas Civic GX now that we're using a home CNG pump, several people wanted to know how much the fuel cost.

We didn't have an answer back then because we hadn't received our  first home gas and electric bills and had no basis for figuring out a cost per gallon.

Well, the bills are in, we've done the conversions (one therm of natural gas is the equivalent of .784 gallons of gasoline) and the math and submitted our first expense report. 

We pumped the GNG equivalent of 51.888 gasoline gallons through the Phill home unit during March, and figure that electricity to run the pump cost $40.29 while the natural gas itself cost $91.69, for total cost of $131.46, or $2.53 per gallon.

That's $1.18 less than the prevailing price of unleaded regular gasoline in our part of Southern California, and anywhere from 7-cents to 32- cents a gallon-equivalent less than the various retail GNG pumps in the area are charging for their natural gas. (The range is so great because one pump is operated by a city and is priced pretty much at cost -- it was $2.60 a gallon when we checked two days ago).

But that's just the first step.

We have just received authorization from our natural gas utility for a home refuling unit discount that should drop the cost of fillling up with the Phill to well below $2 per gallon.

We're expecting the first bill that reflects the discount to arrive at the end of the month and we'll let you know what the new cost-per-gallon is as soon as we crunch the numbers.

John O'Dell, Senior Editor @ 15,147 miles. 

See where the red arrow's pointing? That swath of plastic, which extends around the digital speedometer, is the only soft-touch surface in sight. As for the dashboard surfaces that one actually touches on a regular basis, they're as hard as finding a filling station that carries natural gas. (Read: very.) I suppose it's nice that Honda puts soft-touch plastic somewhere on the Civic's dash -- can't say the same of our long-term Lancer, for instance -- but what's the rationale behind sticking it where only curious automotive journalist-types are likely to notice?

In any case, our Civic's hard plastic-dominated dash is a far cry from mid-1990s Japanese interiors. Corolla, Integra, Prelude, Accord -- soft-touch dashes all. Personally, I don't really care, but it's interesting to chart the cost-cutting changes over the past decade or so. With Japanese manufacturers increasingly turning to the hard stuff, it's no wonder that Volkswagen's pliable plastics are so often singled out for praise.

Incidentally, it has often struck me as rather arbitrary that soft-touch surfaces are expected on high-end automotive dashboards, whereas even the finest hi-fi home audio systems don't have leather-wrapped speakers, say, or soft plastic casing. Why doesn’'t hard plastic raise any critical eyebrows in this application? Conversely, why does it rankle automotive journalists whenever they come across it?

Josh Sadlier, Associate Editor, Edmunds.com @ 14,610 miles

When I bought the 2007 Honda Civic GX for the long term fleet last year I remembered hearing that one of the advantages of this car, besides low pollution and low fuel costs, was that you could go a long time between oil changes. The Honda brochure said that the natural gas it runs on is less corrosive than gasoline so the oil remains uncontaminated longer. And, since it has a maintenance minder, it just tells you when you need service.

When I got into the car I noticed the little wrench light icon and a "B1" in the odometer window. Looking in the manual, I saw that this called for an oil and filter change, a tire rotation, check fluids and various inspections. I emailed my local Honda service department to ask if they could work on the GX and what this would cost. They replied that the B1 service was $104 but that they also recommended two other filter changes that would run $165 so the total would be $269.95. There was nothing in the manual about these other filter changes so I decided to skip it for now.

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After spending Friday and Saturday doing battle with our long-term Civic GX’s painfully positioned handbrake lever, my right knee cried uncle. So I visited the accessory department at my local Honda dealer and managed to find the somewhat unconventional kneepad depicted above. Tell you what -- the difference was night-and-day. I hear Honda’s considering making it a standard feature next year.

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In the previous post, I laid out how we were going to be computing fuel economy in the 2007 Honda Civic GX now that we're using a home fueling unit that doesn't provide a way of measuring the amount of compressed natural gas being pumped.

After a lot of calculating, estimating and talking to Honda engineers, we decided to assign a value of .368 gallon-equivalent to each bar on the Civic GX's fuel gauge. Thus, if we were down 10 bars and refilled overnight, we'd figure we'd pumped 3.68 gallons.

To double check, I ran the tank down by 12 bars this morning and pulled into the neighborhood Clean Energy retail CNG pump to fill it back up on a pump that does measure gallonage.

At our assigned value of .038 gallon per bar,  I expected to pump 4.416 gallons

The readout on the pump said we got  4.471 gallons when the tank registered full.

So our "best guesstimate" method of figuring fuel use was off by just fifty-five thousandths of a gallon (0.055 gallon, to be precise).

John O'Dell, Senior Editor, Green Car Advisor @14,192 miles

A full tank is 20 lighted bars on fuel gauge. Each represents 0.368 gallon.

The city inspector has signed off on it, so our Phill home natural gas pump is officially up and operating. For the 1,395 miles the Civic GX has traveled since at-home refueling began, average fuel economy has jumped by a little more than 3 miles per gallon – an extra 21 miles per tank  as best I can figure it.

Warning: What follows is a lengthy discourse on how we are computing fuel economy with a system that doesn't tell us how many gallons are being pumped into the tank.

For those who don't care about the how,  the net result is that we're now averaging 29.38 miles per gallon in our compressed natural gas Civic GX after 13,562 miles, up from a little over 28 mpg at 10,000 miles. The boost comes mainly from the average of 32.34 mpg we're recorded over the 1,395 miles that we've been using the Phill.

If you do care, or are hoping to catch me in an error (not hard to do), feel free to read on 'til your eyes glaze over.

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Phinally.

The Phill has been installed.

After waiting almost two months from the time we placed the order for the home fueling device at the end of December, I pumped the first made-at-home CNG into our long-term 2007 Civic GX on Friday evening, after the electrician did his thing and hooked the machine up to a 240-volt circuit.

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The Civic GX works fine, but there are some frustrations when you're driving a car that requires specially trained repair people and special fueling equipment that comes from a sole source.

Mostly it boils down to time – time spent waiting.

Two cases in point are the ongoing saga of our Phill home natural gas fueling unit, and a recent recall to install a thermal insulator between the fuel tank and the back seat.

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Took the Civic GX –just named greenest vehicle sold in the U.S. – on a 611-mile weekend trip. It takes a little planning when your fuel isn't the easiest to find, but all went well.

Part of the reason for taking the GX, usually just a commuter car, was to see if we could stand sitting in it for hours on end. Part was to see how difficult it would be to find the compressed natural gas it needs once we got out of the greater Los Angeles area.

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