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Maybe you’ve seen the idea billionaire oil tycoon T. Boone Pickens is proposing to run cars on natural gas. Now, Mr. Pickens may know a lot about the oil and gas industry. But getting people to buy cars that can run on natural gas may not be as easy as he thinks.

Until a few years ago General Motors, Ford, Chrysler, Honda, Toyota and Volvo all offered cars, trucks or vans that could run on compressed natural gas. But they never sold very well and today, in the United States, Honda is the only one left that sells a CNG car.

Even at that, Honda only offers one model that runs on natural gas, the Civic GX. And it will only sell them to individuals in California and New York. Honda boasts that its Civic GX is selling very well and that it’s sold out for 2008. But to put that in perspective, it will barely sell 1,000 natural gas cars this year. And that just shows that these cars can be a hard sell.