Hydrogen cars: what are they and when will we drive them?

Tipped as the future of green motoring, hydrogen cars are virtually emissions-free and both simple and fast to refuel.

Toyota has its own portable refuelling
station for its Mirai hydrogen cars.

So what are they and how soon will we be driving them?

As their name suggests, they use hydrogen as a fuel to power the car.

Colourless, odourless hydrogen gas passes through a fuel stack, where it interacts with oxygen. This process both generates the electricity and creates water, which is the car's only emission and dribbles out from a little tube at the back.

Read Rebecca Turner’s ABC News story - “Hydrogen cars: what are they and when will we drive them?”

(The hydrogen powered car sounds wonderful, and it is, until you consider its Achilles' heel - it doesn’t use any actual fossil fuel as a direct energy source and produces only water from its exhaust, but the hydrogen fuel it depends upon is the product of a fossil fuel, in this instance, gas. And beyond that, construction of the car itself is energy-rich and the infrastructure of which it is a part is simply an extension of a way of life that is clearly unsustainable, concentrating public interest in private transport when the focus should be, clearly, on the creation of a sophisticated public transport system - Robert McLean)