We hope this is a long-term trend and not just a fad.  It seems that more and more fleets are turning to compressed natural gas to fuel their vehicles.

Waste Management in Waterloo, Ontario has a new fleet of CNG trucks.

Three school districts in Connecticut are switching to CNG buses.

Carnival Cruise Lines is building four new cruise ships which will be powered by liquid natural gas.

However, in the interest of fairness, we do have to note that Honda decided to quit making it’s CNG Civic.  They had only sold about 16,000 of them in the last 17 years, so under 1,000 a year.  Their limited distribution area may have affected that.

Fleet vehicles running compressed natural gas make more sense right now than consumer vehicles due to the lack of CNG filling stations.  As long as there’s gasoline available and it’s competitive in price we don’t expect to see CNG replace gasoline for consumers.  The slightly lower price and cleaner nature of CNG just isn’t enough for most consumers.