Toyota Announces Natural Gas Camry Concept

Toyota is looking to join Honda as the only manufacturers to offer natural-gas-powered consumer products. The maker of the Prius hybrid is going to show off a Camry concept that runs on natural gas at the L.A. auto show in November. Called CNGs — for compressed natural gas – these cars can fuel up at one of only 1,000 refueling stations — only half of which are standard retail pumps — or home-based refueling stations.

CNGs have not proven popular, and the Honda Civic CNG is only sold in two states, New York and California. We’ve driven the CNG Civic and it performs much like its gasoline counterpart. We’re just unsure why natural gas makes sense as an alternative fuel for automobiles when there is much less infrastructure for it than E85. More demand for natural gas will also raise prices for those who heat their homes with natural gas. 

Toyota, however, says that building a natural gas infrastructure now would pave the way for a future hydrogen infrastructure. That’s a concept we hadn’t thought of before.

Comments

I'm seeing this one fellow pushing CNG really hard on TV lately. It shows a gas station sign with Gasoline at it's ridiculous current rate and CNG at ~$2.10 or so.
Now when I go down to fill up my 5 gal grill CNG I get 4 gallons for ~$17! Is this the usual California bend over or are the CNG stations going to be better priced? At $2/gallon regardless of the slight efficiency delta that makes CNG look pretty good. And it's cleaner.

You're referring to Boone Pickens, a former big oilman and energy hedge fund manager. He's pushing for huge wind farms in the midwest and shifting gasoline cars to CNG cars to get away from foreign oil (as a national security issue).
http://www.pickensplan.com/theplan/