Natural-Gas Guzzler

Eric Adams, Automotive Editor
The Civic GX was delivered to PopSci in early August, but the installation of the Phill station took several weeks to complete. This was because the FuelMaker installer had to jump through some local and state ordinance hoops to get the required permissions-it's only the second unit installed in New Jersey, so the assorted government agencies hadn't seen it before. Then there were electrical issues at my house that caused the unit to repeatedly trip the circuit breaker. Once that was sorted out, Phill worked like a charm. It's incredibly easy to use: Every night I come home, plug the nozzle into the car's receptacle (the connection is firm, and there's a break-away feature in case someone drives off without unplugging), and hit the â€start†button. A quiet fan starts operating, and the fueling process begins.

The GX runs on gas pressurized to 3,600 pounds (the fuel tank is wrapped in carbon fiber to add strength and improve puncture resistance), and the Phill station takes about 16 hours to fill the car from empty. The reason for the length of time is that, unlike public stations, which have compressors that can fill the car in roughly two minutes, Phill does not have a compressor built in, so it relies on the slow accumulation of pressure over an extended period. A 16-hour fill-up sounds like a long time, but in daily use you would never really refuel from empty. Few people drive more than 60 miles a day, so as long as you plug in at least every other day, you'll be able to top it off in only five to eight hours.

My own early experiences with the car suggest virtually effortless use as a daily commuter; fueling is simple and the car's 240-mile range ensures that I always have plenty of gas to motor around my area. But extended road trips require considerable planning and an awareness that this car is a different sort of animal. You really have to buy into that fact to use it, and appreciate that you might be inconvenienced when taking trips-and that some trips may not be possible at all. Indeed, some of the editors interested in driving the car have already had to be turned away at the door because their destinations were to areas that either didn't have public stations or the stations that were public required accounts that the magazine hasn't yet established (few of them actually take credit cards). Stations tend to be clustered around urban areas, but there are many in relatively rural spots. You can easily drive from New York to Washington, D.C., Boston, Cape Cod or Philadelphia, for example, but trips to New Jersey's southern beaches or, say, Pittsburgh may not be possible at all. (The car is not intended, by the way, as a road-trip car-though we are occasionally using it as such to investigate the entire natural-gas-fueling infrastructure-but rather as a commuter car that offers huge environmental and economic benefits. Most users with families would have a second car anyway, and use that for extended trips.)

As a car, the GX is virtually identical to conventional Civics, although there is very little trunk space because of the large, pressurized fuel tank. Its 113hp engine feels slightly anemic in this age of 200hp sedans, but it's perfectly serviceable as long as you don't have a fondness for jackrabbit starts at stoplights. From the driver's seat, my only complaint is that there is no distance-to-empty display near the digital fuel gauge. This is, perhaps, the only car in the world that really needs one-given the fact that if you run out of fuel, you're dead in the water-and it's nowhere to be found. Honda tells me that this is because none of the other cars in the Civic lineup offer it, and it's too expensive to include in a single model. Hopefully, the company will integrate one in future model-years.