Now To Re-Fuel Your Vehicle Using Natural Gas

Reuters is reporting:

When Connie Jones arrives home from her job as an information technology manager in Chandler, Arizona, she parks her car in her garage and fills it up with natural gas. It is a convenience that relatively few Americans can enjoy.

"We hook it up, turn it on, and it fills up overnight," said Connie's husband Travis, who bought a natural gas home refueling unit in January 2012. 

With natural gas at $1.40 per equivalent gallon, it costs the Joneses $30 to drive their Honda Civic GX 1,200 miles each month, about $130 less than an average gasoline car covering the same distance. 

Home refueling units, which tap into a house natural gas main and compress the fuel so it can fill a vehicle tank overnight, have been available for years. 

But even though the fuel is cheap and units have to meet safety standards like other household appliances, home refilling is uncommon in the United States, held back by the upfront expense of buying and installing new units, and a lack of natural gas cars. The cars themselves generally cost about $10,000 more than comparable conventional vehicles.

I wonder if the author has ever shopped for/bought an automobile. 

Some data points:

• $10,000 / $130 = 76 months (exceeds the length of the loan)
• $10,000 up front: lost opportunity to use that cash for something else (like investing)
• $10,000 financed will cost more than $10,000
• fueling station in garage: $6,000 ("four years to pay off the initial outlay")
• in Atlanta, Georgia: ten (10) home refueling units have been sold

"Home refueling has not grown as much as people would have hoped because there aren't many cars to choose from," said Kevin McCrackin, vice president of business development at AGL Resources in Atlanta.

More data points:

• 66,000 light-duty natural gas-powered cars on U.S. roads
• nearly 200 million light-duty vehicles on U.S. roads
• only 605 public compressed natural gas (CNG) stations in the United States
• more than 120,000 gasoline stations  

While the number of small consumer natural gas cars on the road is far smaller than electric vehicles, their 200-mile (322- km) range is twice as large as most electric cars - and they fill up faster. 

Not gonna happen in my investing lifetime. I doubt my daughters will ever be driving CNG. My granddaughters? Possibly.