2009 Honda FCX Clarity - Road Test

Where’s the best place to meet Jamie Lee Curtis? Why, at the bustling corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Federal Avenue near hippy-dippy Santa Monica, California, where you can’t toss a watermelon without hitting a Toyota Prius.

Jamie Lee will be the one in the merlot-colored Honda, gliding up to one of those rarest of things, a commercial hydrogen fuel pump. Stand there, enjoying the company of the loitering beach bums for a day or three, and you’re all but guaranteed to see her roll in, low on juice, her FCX Clarity shaped like an Australian lungfish and whining like a tomcat being scalped.

On the Santa Monica smugness scale, the Clarity mops the floor with the Prius. It stores hydrogen at a liquefied 5000 psi, plumbs it through a Honda-designed fuel cell with air to make electricity, leaving water as the sole tailpipe effluent. The only powertrain noise is the lynx-like yowl of the fuel cell’s air compressor, plus the tap-tap of Henry Cavendish, the 18th-century discoverer of hydrogen, doing I-told-you-so jigs in his grave.