THE car of the future is totally silent, emissions-free — and were it for sale would cost you a cool £1 million, a bit steep for a modest, unexceptional three-door hatch. Except that the FCX, Honda’s ultra-clean fuel-cell car, has a lot going for it, not least its fuel-cell technology that allows it to run without any exhaust emissions, though Honda concedes that its development has cost the equivalent of 100 Honda Civics, a car priced from £10,000.

Honda has been working on the car for six years. But what is it like to drive? The Times became one of the first to get the chance to find out and discovered that, bizarrely, one of the apparent great strengths is also, in the real world, one of its biggest drawbacks. For the car is totally silent. Great, you would think, except for when car meets pedestrian.

From inside, the silence is strangely unsettling. There is no noise to tell you that the car is ready to go, or how hard the engine is working. Only when engine noise is missing do you realise how much you rely on it to tell you how the car is driving and working.

Plus, while petrol and diesel-engined cars might not be great for the environment, they do make enough racket to alert those on foot. Driving the FCX down a quiet country lane, only a quick double toot on the horn alerted the unsuspecting family ahead from walking out in front of us, completely unaware that the car was approaching.

Driving the FCX is as simple as driving a fairground dodgem. Turn it on, press the accelerator, and go. In front of you the only two gauges that matter are the speedo, and the “Distance to Empty” display. Honda seems to have cracked a key drawback to such cars in the past — range. The FCX has a range of more than 250 miles on a tank of hydrogen, and a top speed of 95mph.

Acceleration is remarkably lively, and a look at some figures explains why. The FCX puts out 272Nm of torque (about 200lb/ft) compared to about 219Nm (161lb/ft) for the 1.7-litre diesel Civic and only 130Nm (96lb/ft) for the Civic 1.4 petrol. The FCX also boasts more bhp than the diesel or petrol Civic.

The downside to this is that if you get on the throttle too clumsily coming out of a corner, the power causes the car to lurch and pull to the side. Also, this is a heavy car for its size. The Honda Civic is about the same length at 4.1 metres, but the FCX weighs 400kg more, so that while the FCX “clever” brakes generate more electricity when they are used, they feel overworked and soggy.

For Honda, though, the big job still to be done is not to sharpen up the brakes, but to make the car cheaper to mass produce, which means cutting the cost of the car’s ingenious technology. A hydrogen tank in the car’s rear feeds its fuel cell stack. Within the stack the hydrogen combines with oxygen in the atmosphere to produce the electricity, which in turn powers the car’s motors (which drive the wheels), producing only water as its waste.

The FCX can operate at temperatures as low as -20C and has won approval from America’s Environmental Protection Agency. But does the FCX spell the death of petrol and diesel? Not for a while yet. “In the next ten years I am afraid that the price of the FCX will not go down,” Sachito Fujimoto, the project leader, said. “It will be expensive but in 15 to 20 years I believe the FCX has got the potential to come down to a price equivalent to that of a Civic today, and become a mass production vehicle.”

There is one other drawback — where would such cars fill up? Honda is working on that one, too, developing solarpowered forecourts that would use power from the sun to manufacture industrial amounts of hydrogen from water, then storing it in high-pressure tanks from which cars such as the FCX can refuel. All they need now are loudspeakers on the bonnet and a suitable soundtrack for the car with which to warn unsuspecting pedestrians.

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