By Phil Yost Knight Ridder Newspapers Behind the wheel of a fuel
cell car on Earth Day, I'm driving the squeaky clean vehicle of
the future. Hydrogen goes into the tank, electricity goes into
the motor, only water vapor comes out the tailpipe. Or maybe I'm
driving into a technological dead end. A future of affordable
fuel cell cars is far from assured. But at least the prototypes
work. The car I drove looked and felt like a regular car. The
fuel cell car is certainly the vehicle of the future in one
sense. It's the basket into which all the eggs have been put in
the quest for a zero-emission car. The battery-powered electric
car, the darling of a decade ago, has been parked in the back
lot. In his State of the Union Message in January 2003,
President Bush vowed to boost federal funding for fuel cell
vehicles to $1.2 billion over five years, replacing a program
for a super-efficient gasoline car. And two days after Earth Day
2003, the California Air Resources Board adopted new standards
for zero-emission vehic