Honda FCX Clarity

This day in history, on April 9th, 2009, the Honda FCX Clarity, a four-door sedan billed as the planet’s first hydrogen-powered fuel-cell vehicle intended for mass production, wins the World Green Car award at the New York Auto Show.

The first FCX Clarity cars came off the assembly line at a Honda plant in Takanezawa, Japan, in June 2008. As The New York Times reported at the time: “Fuel-cell vehicles have been a sort of holy grail of the auto industry, offering the promise of driving without emitting air-polluting exhaust. Fuel cells work by combining hydrogen and oxygen from ordinary air to make electricity, in a process whose only byproducts are water and heat.”