Hydrogen fuel-cell vehicles are still few in number - and the infrastructure supporting them is pretty patchy. But that’s not stopping major manufacturers from pushing ahead with the technology that can fuel a car and emit only water. And we’ve been to Stuttgart for an early ride in the latest arrival on the market: the Mercedes GLC F-CELL.

This isn’t the first fuel-cell Mercedes, but it demonstrates the sort of gains the German manufacturer is making in the area. The GLC’s overall powertrain is about 40 per cent more powerful than the set-up in the previous offering, the B-Class F-CELL, but it uses 90 per cent less platinum. And that makes it considerably cheaper.

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Not that price will be bothering British customers. Because for now at least, Mercedes has elected to not offer the GLC F-CELL in its UK dealerships. It’s available in continental Europe now, though, and it has been engineered for right-hand drive because of the burgeoning market for fuel cells in Japan.

The GLC F-CELL uses a pair of hydrogen tanks below the floor, each protected by a carbonfibre shell and pressurised to 700 bar. That means that refuelling takes about the same time as a normal petrol or diesel vehicle - around three minutes. And brimming the GLC F-CELL will give you up to 437km of range, or 272 miles. You can also plug the car into a wall socket, topping up a lithium-ion battery pack that’s big enough (9.3kWh) to allow around 30 miles of that range without using a drop of hydrogen at all. The connection is via a flap, positioned on the rear bumper.

The fuel cell ‘stack’, mounted under the bonnet on the same fixing points as a petrol or diesel engine, turns the hydrogen into electricity by mixing it with oxygen, and feeds this, through the battery, to power a 197bhp electric motor on the back axle that has 350Nm of torque and is capable of taking the GLC F-CELL to a top speed of 100mph. There’s no four-wheel drive, then; this is a rear-drive SUV only. And the whole package is about 100kg heavier than a normal GLC.