Fuel cell cars … they sound like pure magic, until you think about it. Ponder it long enough and you might come to understand that the whole idea of waiting decades for a hydrogen-economy to develop is pure something else (that I’m not allowed to say). Here’s why …

Fuel-cell cars use electric motors. No magic there. Electric motors have been used to power vehicles for decades on end.

Fuel cells combine stored hydrogen with outside air to produce electricity. In a fuel-cell car, this electricity powers the motor that provides the means of propulsion. Fuel cell shmuel cell, I say … when you get down to the core, we’re talking about electric cars. The fuel cell merely replaces a bank of batteries.

General Motors’ EV1 was a splendid electric-motored automobile. Alas, GM pulled the plug on the EV1 project a few years back and crushed the vehicles as they returned from lease. (All EV1s were leased, none were sold outright.)

The EV1s delivered plenty of get up and go: 0-60 MPH in 8.5 seconds, with a top end of 80 mph. And according to Wikipedia, the second generation NiMH battery-equipped units were good for 75 to 130 miles per overnight charge.

GM was not the only large automaker to experiment with electric cars. Toyota built the RAV4-EV, an electric-motored version of their compact sport utility vehicle. Unlike GM, Toyota sold the RAV4-EVs to customers outright.

I wake with a recurring dream … where I’m driving a chopped and channeled deuce coupe. But there’s no flathead mill underneath the hood … instead, it’s powered by an electric motor. Sure, it can’t be ported and relieved or stroked and bored, but it can still do 140 in the top end floored.

I’d be happy to fill the deuce coupe’s trunk with batteries until a time when the hydrogen economy comes about and I can replace the batteries with a fuel cell. I’d be perfectly content to plug it into a wall socket every night for the next twenty years, or so …

Related: New Cars that average 30 MPG or higher