I’m at the Zuzu Café in my hometown of Seneca Falls, NY, and parked out front is my ride for the next three days: one of only 100 fuel-cell powered cars on the road today in the United States.

This baby goes from 0 to 60 in 12 seconds. It has a top speed of 100 mph (80 kmh). It runs so quiet that the first time I turned it on I didn’t think anything had happened. This is a street-legal car that runs smooth, won’t need a refill for 215 miles, runs on the most common element in the universe and emits only water vapour and heat as byproducts.

Fuel cells create electric power from the free electron that’s released when hydrogen, stored as a gas in the four tanks built into this production-line Equinox, combines with environmental oxygen across a saran-wrap-like membrane. The only other products of the reaction are water vapor and heat.

The car I’m driving is part of a GM test and promotional programme which is looking to get driver feedback and drum up support for this technology. Personally, I don’t need to be sold — this is zero emission driving, with zero reliance on fossil fuels. When you consider that personal cars account for about 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, this is the car which, if it met the objective of replacing the internal combustion engine, could mean a far more liveable world for the children of my children.

There are issues, of course — there always are — one being about how we as a civilization decide to mass-produce hydrogen if these babies go into mass production. You can do it clean, and you can do it dirty, and the spectrum ranges from the rather absurd use of nuclear energy to simply letting offshore wind farms liberate hydrogen from seawater through electrolysis.

The joke around GM, which recently emerged from bankruptcy and is now 60% owned by the US government, is that it’s going to be renamed Obama Motors. Obama would be well advised to have a look at this tiny little skunk works that he has running in Upstate New York. It may not be an answer to the short-term financial problems that GM is facing, but this is one strong player in the long game: zero emissions, zero dependence on foreign oil. If one quarter of the oil industry’s profits were put into investing in a hydrogen distribution system for the United States, a viable passenger car fleet in America could be running on fuel cells within a decade.

So how come I can’t buy this car? I blogged more extensively on the energy policy reasons over at Daily Kos.