CNG Vehicle market

[ACMAir]

Do you think the market for CNG powered vehicles is greater than that of Hybrid vehicles? CNG gives us time until we find a reliable alternative to petroleum, while Hybrids still rely on gas. Why aren't more car companies hopping onbard the train to CNG?

[byzantium]

CNG vehicles still don't work very well. When several US cities converted their public transit fleets to CNG, they were plagued by breakdowns, a bad thing for a bus system. They eventually got buses that worked, but it took a while. CNG cars would be dead before they got them to work right. A suburb of Sacramento bought diesel-hybrid buses, only to have riders scrambling for safety as the buses went up in flames. Today, they use standard diesel buses. Diesel cars never caught on in the US because 70s models brought over from Europe were such gross polluters that California and several states in New England outlawed them. It took 30 years to make a diesel car that would pass muster. Methanol was tried in the early 90s, but fleet managers found that it corroded the paint off the cars, and the skin off the hands of the drivers. Ethanol is going nowhere, because Congress requires it to be made from corn, pushing up food prices worldwide. Brazil makes it from sugar cane, which is plentiful. Sugar beet based ethanol has been proposed but not tried. Hydrogen tends to blow up easily. When a car crash can wipe out whole suburbs, that's hardly a selling point. (That's one reason those nifty nuclear powered cars proposed in the 50s never were attempted-a car crash could destroy an entire city.) The real future is in electric, but batteries so far don't work too well.

[ACMAir]

Hydrogen powered cars are the dumbest things alive. 95% of hydrogen is made by burning fossil fuels, so HOW does that help us??

We need something to run on magnetic fields. I'm actually experimenting with it at the moment, or something, for a short term, like what mercedes came up with, that uses uria to dissolve the exhaust.