Originally Posted By: Burt
How far from home do you feel comfortable driving?
What do you plan to do when it's time to sell?
Just curious.
1. "Range anxiety" is actually a real concern among owners of vehicles like this, along with owners of all-electric cars. We'll go pretty much as far as we want, based upon the location of fueling stations which are a keystroke away on her smartphone app. The car easily goes 250 miles on a full tank in Chicago-area driving, much more on a highway trip (42 mpg not exactly adhering to the posted limit). In her first few days of ownership she drove from Chicago to the Detroit suburbs to visit family, filling up in Ann Arbor, MI going there and coming back. No biggie. The reality of my wife's car is that she uses it 99% of the time as a back-and-forth-to-work vehicle and as a grocery-getter (using that term generically, not trying to be sexist), so she's not going to have any problem with distance or fueling concerns. There's a public filling station 2 miles from her office and another 1.5 miles from our home near Chicago Midway Airport. Just filled up at the latter location tonight for $2.49 per gallon. If we have some big road trip to take, we'd use my car anyway as it is simply more spacious and that's what we've done for many years.
2. Her last two cars have gone over 160K and we expect the same with this one. The age and the mileage of the cars, combined with the fact that she chooses pretty basic vehicles to begin with, doesn't leave much value remaining by the time we're done, so we usually just pass them on to a worthy younger person in the family in need of a college-type car. Dunno if there will be another college-age kid in 12 years, dunno if that kid would want to have anything to do with some "weird" CNG car, but we'll see!
Definitely taking a bit of a risk with the vehicle, but she and I are perfectly fine with making small adjustments necessary to own the car. CNG may very well be a slow-building wave of the future, maybe not, but I don't see anything too concerning other than "Honey, do NOT get too low on gas anymore!"
