Honda has been inundated with enquiries for its FCX Clarity fuel-cell car since its launch last weekend, so we asked Englishman abroad Pat Devereux to get that crucial first drive, while Andrew English wonders why the Californians seem to get all the best environmental tech

To understand how popular Honda's new fuel-cell miracle car, the FCX Clarity, is going to be in California - the only market it will sell in initially - you don't need to look much further than the microsite Honda has created for it.

Quick off the mark: Honda's FCX Clarity has plenty of torque to pull away quickly from just 1rpm

Browse through the site's digital pages and all the key words for success in the sun-drenched state are there. It's new, it doesn't use any petrol and it's in very, very short supply.

Any one of those three statements would be enough to cause a scrum outside the dealership here, but all three? That's enough to start a stampede.

Most cars wouldn't be worth the trouble or the wait. But having just driven the first production version of the Clarity, I think it just might be. Looking like a cross between a Toyota Prius and a VW Passat, the Clarity is four inches shorter than a Honda Accord and about the same width. So you expect it to have a similar level of roominess and storage. That's the first mistake. Open any one of the four doors and you find the Clarity, thanks to its lack of a normal drivetrain, has the same amount of space as something a couple of classes bigger. In tune with the low-emission remit, the interior is finished in plant-based fabrics that help shrink the Clarity's carbon footprint even further.

The next surprise is the total lack of any noise when you turn the key, press the start button and fire up the fuel cell. The only sign that it's ready to move is the layered 3D instrument console that explodes into life like a mini firework display. You select drive by using a stumpy lever on the dash and then… that's it really. You just stamp on the accelerator and off you go. There's a distant noise like a muffled jet engine as the car arrows forward, rising in pitch as the speed accumulates. But even that noise melts away once you've reached cruising speed. There's no vibration whatsoever.

It feels quick off the line, as it should with 189lb ft of torque available to shove the car from 1rpm upwards. It also has plenty of mid-range power and top speed is quoted as 100mph, but that feels very pessimistic.

The ride is a bit hard and occasionally choppy when the road surface is a mess, but generally it's so good that you don't notice it - the definition of something working properly.

Which you could say of the whole car. I was expecting to have to make all sorts of allowances for it being the first pre-production version of the FCX Clarity, albeit in steel rather than the FCX Concept's carbon-fibre body. In the end, however, I didn't have to make any allowances, I just got in and drove it away.

It was so convincing that I went home and tried to put my name on the list to get one. But I couldn't.

In the five days since the car made its debut at the LA Auto Show, so many people had visited the FCX Clarity site to sign up for one of the 100 or so cars that will be available next summer, it had crashed under the load.

That, I think, tells us all we need to know about its future popularity. PD

'We're Californians, we love our cars," said Arnie Schwarzenegger at the opening of the Los Angeles Auto Show last week. "I haven't seen this much technology since my Terminator days," joked the Californian "Governator".

	Green state of affair: Arnold Schwarzenegger at the opening of the LA Motor Show

It's a typical Californian reaction to technology like the FCX, not dissimilar to that of a magpie; anything shiny, new, rare and expensive, they've just gotta have it.

The trouble is that Americans, and Californians in particular, are incredibly parochial in their responses to environmental technology. California's foggy, smoggy climate is well documented. European ships blithely sailed past the fog-obscured entrance to San Francisco Bay until 1769 and, on some days, Los Angeles and Orange County is a 20 million-person pot-boiler of photochemical smog between the mountains and the Pacific.

It was Dr Arlie Haagen-Smit who, in 1950, discovered the link between hydrocarbons, oxides of nitrogen and the sunlight that produces LA's smog. After a drawn-out fight by the motor industry, Californian cars got limited smog protection in 1966, while the rest of the US followed at the end of the decade. In this case, the interests of LA coincided with everyone else's. Subsequently, this has not always been the case, but California is America's biggest and most important car market and it wields enormous influence on the cars that you and I drive. The first exhaust catalytic converters, bought in to reduce local smog-causing pollutants, also caused engines to drink more fuel and emit more CO2. The EU capitulated under pressure from car makers to adopt catalysts, and thus the promising eco technologies of lean-burn and stratified charge combustion were put back decades.

OK, it was General Motors that bought out all the bus companies and encouraged the rail lines to be ripped up in LA, but the city fathers have done nothing to restore public transport since. Angelenos drive everywhere and only the poor catch the few buses that remain.

And even though the Californians don't make any cars, they are very fond of telling everyone else what to drive. Like hybrids, which are designed largely for the stop-start traffic of LA and Tokyo. Plug-in hybrids are the latest piece of "Not-Invented-Here" technology championed by the state. Electricity for its 36 million inhabitants is generated mainly by burning natural gas, but the rest of America's electricity is generated with coal, a much dirtier fuel. Plugging in a hybrid in another state results in more pollutants and CO2, but, hey, who cares? Honda's first production fuel cell was "adopted" by the beautiful people to such an extent that they wouldn't let us near it, despite the fact that I've been writing about fuel cells for 20 years. Instead, I listened to "explanations" of how fuel cells work until I wondered if it all ran on magic, or maybe Bovril.

I had to keep reminding myself that Sir William Grove, the inventor of the fuel cell in 1839, was British, and that Geoffrey Ballard, the acknowledged father of the fuel cell is Canadian and that the FCX Clarity was developed at Honda's Japanese R & D centre.

Still, we've only ourselves to blame. While soon you won't be able to move for shots of Hollywood stars hanging out with their cute £300-a-month hydrogen Hondas, in Britain no one has yet driven a fuel-cell car. I wonder if this has anything to do with the fact that, since the closure of the BP/BOC hydrogen filling station in Thurrock, Essex, there is nowhere to fill up a Honda or any of its rivals. LA has at least five filling stations and wants 16 by 2010. As they say in California, "now there's a plan".