[hatbert]

Honda sold a CNG version of the Civic here in SoCal for a while. It didn't sell very well because the tank took up most of the trunk and the range wasn't much better than most electric cars (around 150 miles, as I recall).

On top of that, the number of refueling stations is very limited--natural gas pipes are ubiquitous in cities, but they deliver the gas at a much lower pressure. You still need a roughly $2k compressor to fill the tank overnight (which uses about as much electricity as you'd put in an electric car). Commercial stations have more expensive compressors that operate continuously to fill a holding tank which cars are filled from.

It's not impossible. But the infrastructure required to put energy in the vehicle costs the same or more as for an electric car. And you use just as much electricity as an electric car (in addition to the natural gas). And the cars aren't that much cheaper than battery EVs. And the cars have similar range and refilling limitations as EVs.

Maybe we'll see it for trucks, though.

[toomuchtodo]

UPS is already using Natural Gas/Diesel hybrid engines for runs between SoCal and Vegas.

[fancyketchup]

The trucks are driving between relatively fixed points, so it's a simple matter to build CNG stations there. Plus, the cost of a battery scales linearly with the capacity of the battery, while the cost of the CNG tank scales the square root of the capacity. Batteries are also heavier per unit energy, which reduces the truck's legal payload capacity.

So that use case has a strong argument for CNG.

Weight doesn't really matter for a personal automobile, and you can't (easily) make the tank big enough to argue that a large tank is cheaper than a large battery. It's true, but costs unrelated to tank size are still important, and the bigger issue is that the range sucks unless you give up the entire trunk (since you can't make a CNG tank flat (like Tesla) or T-shaped (like GM).