It seems like a no-brainer. An internal combustion engine burns dwindling reserves of fossil fuels to propel a car forwards in a cloud of poisonous smoke. A fuel cell, on the other hand, uses the most abundant atom in the universe to silently drive powerful electric motors. The exhaust emissions? Pure, drinkable water.

Hydrogen sounds almost too good to be true, like something out of a Sixties sci-fi paperback. But from where I’m sitting – the driver’s seat of a Toyota fuel cell vehicle, about to fill it up at a motorway fuel station – the future seems to have arrived.

I’m using the UK’s newest hydrogen pump, opened this week at Cobham services on the M25. It’s the unlikely epicentre of a green revolution. This isn’t the first hydrogen filling station in the UK, but it’s the first on a motorway, the first on a public forecourt, and the first one that might actually encourage private buyers to choose a hydrogen car.