About a month ago, I took a cab home to Alabang. It has been a while since I took a cab because I drive or take something a lot cheaper than cabs.

I'm not going to rant about the cab driver. In fact, he was a careful driver (I'm not the snob type that sits at the back). But before I start with the rant, I have a rave.

What's cool about this cab is that it runs on LPG (yes, your ordinary shellane or gasul). It's not the first time I saw this. All the cabs and small coaches in Hong Kong use LPG. Singapore, Malaysia and Thailand probably have the same setup.

The emmission is cleaner and it is a lot cheaper. The driver said the cab could go round trip, non-stop from Manila to Pangasinan with a full tank. That's about 400 kilometers. A full tank costs around PhP900.00 (for a 1996 Toyota Corolla model; don't know how many liters).

The driver said that the conversion is around PhP20,000.00 and the tank is installed in the trunk. A couple of Petron gas stations around the metro has facilities for these cabs. And in case you run out of fuel and can't find a nearby gas station that has the facilities, you could switch back to the, err, normal gas.

I did hear about this arriving here about four years ago but there were only three gas stations that you could go to and cabs didn't use them yet.

From what I was told though, the cab doesn't have that umf for the performance junkies. I did notice that the driver could't go over 80km/h or he was just saving fuel and being practical. It could be slow when loaded with four big people plus baggage.

Now for my rant, I asked the driver if there is some kind of tax incentive or some initiative that the Philippine government is doing. The answer is obvious and is the reason why I'm ranting. The government could at least sponsor research and development for this.

HK's cabs are Toyota Crowns, they weigh a lot more and heavier than our cabs and they have LPG-powered coaches for crying out loud. They managed to make the most of this fuel. In the United States, you have tax incentives if you use a hybrid car (I think it's 10%). I hate comparing from other countries and asking, "if they can do it, why can't we?" but I want to give some examples and ideas.

If they do look into this, the benefits are a lot. This really needs a lot of exposure and support. We get to save on fuel, reduce air pollution and help our cab drivers.

I'm also wondering why the hybrid cars aren't getting sold here. A friend who used to work for Toyota said that there's only one Toyota Prius is here and it's even owned by some big politician.

I also heard of other possible fuel sources such as cow dung but it was not that efficient, you needed a big-ass flatbed diesel truck to carry the cow dung fuel. We also have the water-powered car but I'm not really sure what happened with the patent and the development. There were rumors that the inventor was threatened by our gas companies.