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Talking to my brother over the holiday weekend, I learned that he bought a new (used) car.
It sounds pretty damn cool. He bought it on E-bay from a fleet in Pennsylvania and had it shipped to him in California. It's a used Honda Accord that he got for $15,000 plus a couple hundred for the shipping.
It runs on compressed natural gas. The tank is in the trunk so the trunk is much smaller than a normal trunk, and it only has a range of like 200 miles, and the natural gas stations are pretty rare. So all that is less than ideal.
But he says it costs only $12 to fill it up, and it runs about 200 miles on that fill. There is a station right along his commute in the Bay Area, so it's very convenient for him for around town use. It looks and behaves just like a regular Honda Accord in every other way. And the best thing is that he can drive in the HOV (car pool) lanes alone in the car. So he rockets past all the other traffic and pays half to a quarter of what they do per mile for fuel. He isn't selling his old car, so he can still use the gasoline powered one for road trips where compressed stations are rare.
I know the entire nation can't switch to natural gas, because there just isn't enough of the stuff, but it's working out really well for him.
I'll visit him in three weeks and get to see the car first hand.
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