Spring Break
The Daily OrangeEnvironmentally friendly cars not meant for college
By Hannah Warren
Posted: 4/9/09, 2:31 AM EST Section: Feature
As I packed my duffel bag last night, excitedly preparing for my first trip home since January, I found myself debating whether to bring my car keys at all. This is by no means because I dislike driving - to me, accelerating on the sprawling highways of Pennsylvania is one of the best adrenaline rushes ever. (Yeah, cheap thrills. I take what I can get when I'm under parental supervision.)
But there is a not-too-pleasing aspect to driving at home. I don't speed around in a sexy Audi TT RS, or even a cute little Honda Insight. Nope. When I want to go anywhere, I do it soccer mom style, in my light blue, 1998 Ford Windstar. The thing is a tank of a minivan, decidedly female and affectionately dubbed "Baby Beluga."
Now understand, I'm not at all vain. It isn't the embarrassment of my hand-me-down Beluga that makes me avoid driving her. It's the sheer amount of smog that I can see coming out of the exhaust pipe that makes me cringe.
I don't like being hypocritical, especially when it's obvious. I'm the environmental columnist and I should take my own enviro advice. I should be driving around a spunky little hybrid car. So I set off to researching, trying to put together a convincing pitch for a new car to spring on my parents.
It turns out that there has been a relatively green fuel available to consumers for years, which has just recently begun to catch on. Compressed Natural Gas (the same stuff that heats buildings and ignites gas stoves) has been a common fuel for machinery in warehouses, because it burns so much cleaner than gasoline.
Honda has produced a version of its hugely popular Civic, called the Civic GX, which runs on CGN. Since its release, the EPA has lauded the GX as "the cleanest internal combustion vehicle in the world." What I want to know is why it took so long for this technology to develop and become commercially available.
We're suffering from an oil addiction, people. According to pickensplan.com, a Web site that proposes steps to reach economic independence from oil-exporting nations, we spent $475 billion on foreign oil in 2008 alone. There are 85 million barrels of foreign oil are produced daily, and each day the United States uses 21 million barrels.
But there is a not-too-pleasing aspect to driving at home. I don't speed around in a sexy Audi TT RS, or even a cute little Honda Insight. Nope. When I want to go anywhere, I do it soccer mom style, in my light blue, 1998 Ford Windstar. The thing is a tank of a minivan, decidedly female and affectionately dubbed "Baby Beluga."
Now understand, I'm not at all vain. It isn't the embarrassment of my hand-me-down Beluga that makes me avoid driving her. It's the sheer amount of smog that I can see coming out of the exhaust pipe that makes me cringe.
I don't like being hypocritical, especially when it's obvious. I'm the environmental columnist and I should take my own enviro advice. I should be driving around a spunky little hybrid car. So I set off to researching, trying to put together a convincing pitch for a new car to spring on my parents.
It turns out that there has been a relatively green fuel available to consumers for years, which has just recently begun to catch on. Compressed Natural Gas (the same stuff that heats buildings and ignites gas stoves) has been a common fuel for machinery in warehouses, because it burns so much cleaner than gasoline.
Honda has produced a version of its hugely popular Civic, called the Civic GX, which runs on CGN. Since its release, the EPA has lauded the GX as "the cleanest internal combustion vehicle in the world." What I want to know is why it took so long for this technology to develop and become commercially available.
We're suffering from an oil addiction, people. According to pickensplan.com, a Web site that proposes steps to reach economic independence from oil-exporting nations, we spent $475 billion on foreign oil in 2008 alone. There are 85 million barrels of foreign oil are produced daily, and each day the United States uses 21 million barrels.
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