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the green highway

2012 Honda Civic Natural Gas at a public natural gas fuelling station.Honda

The announcement of The Green Car of The Year is a much publicized feature of the Los Angeles Auto Show. This year, the winner will be named on Nov. 17.

A panel of auto celebrities – Jay Leno, Mario Andretti, etc. – and a few environmentalists make the choice. The award has been around since 2006 – the first three winners were hybrids (a Ford, a Toyota and a GM), the next two were diesels from Volkswagen Group; last year, it was the Chevy Volt.

La La Land is the perfect setting for the prize-giving. As befits the home of Hollywood, the hype and hyperbole and hypocrisy surrounding the selection is worthy of $100-million cinema flop.

The mayor of L.A. always shows up for the photo op to declare Los Angeles the Green Car Capital of the World. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, perhaps best known for dumping his wife and taking up with not one but two local television anchor women, might care to check out the 12 lanes of traffic jammed on freeways with gas guzzlers bumper to bumper before making such a ludicrous claim.

However, the award attracts scads of local and national television coverage on the exciting day and there is always good reasoning behind the selection. So let's take a look at this year's five finalists and see if we can a pick a winner in advance.

The first finalist is a car that is hopelessly late and isn't even on the market yet but that doesn't mean it can't be pumped up with Hollywood-style publicity. It is the Ford Focus Electric that no one I know has seen in running order yet alone driven. This will be the all-electric version of the third-generation Ford Focus powered by an electric drive system from Frank Stronach's electric car works at Magna. The car looks good but who knows how it will perform when it finally dribbles out to selected markets next year. Even Hollywood can't pretend this deserves to be this year's winner.

Next up is the Mitsubishi i-MiEV, which is the little all-electric that is supposed to get 155 kilometres on a single charge. Again, this is a car that you can't buy today, however Mitsu Canada will put you on the waiting list. Mitsu has been selling it for the past two years in Japan however and it had a pretty successful test run last winter in Quebec. The thing that distinguishes this one will be its price. In Canada, they start at $33,000 before government rebates. But still, giving it the prize would be like giving an Oscar to a movie you haven't seen.

Now we get to the diesels. I mentioned that two diesels have already won this award – Volkswagen Jetta TDI and Audi A3 TDI – and was surprised at the time the panel would choose oil burners in a country where they do not go over well. Americans will have to catch up to the Europeans sooner or later. In Germany and Austria, diesel cars are well over half the fleet and winning Green Car awards might help the cause in the United States. This year's contender is the Passat TDI. Long-distance commuters are going to get their heads around this some day.

Last on the list is a surprise – the Honda Civic GX, which is the latest version of the venerable Civic but factory-built to run on compressed natural gas (CNG). Honda has been doing natural gas cars in dribs and drabs since 1998 in the United States, but not Canada; however, it is putting a bigger push on this one by offering it in all 50 states. It's also flogging a home refuelling appliance so you can fill it up off the gas piped in for your home heating. A fill-up is good for 300 kilometres. You'd better plan on filling it at home because CNG filling stations have pretty much disappeared. We used to see lots of CNG taxis and limos in the 1980s but there wasn't enough money in it for the oil companies to continue selling it at their gas stations.

My hunch is that the quirky panel with their history of quirky choices will go for the Natural Gas Civic. The panel is well aware of all the T. Boone Pickens advertising of the glories of natural gas and his company Clean Energy Fuels. With all the fracked shale gas coming on these days, we might expect a second chance is in the offing for CNG. So send the prize now; Civic GX can't miss.

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