I drove Honda's stunning hydrogen-powered car - here's what it was like

It's why Toyota paid for an ad spot for its hydrogen-powered Mirai during the Super Bowl for viewers in San Francisco and Los Angeles. These vehicles have already left the garage, but there's quite a lot of legwork that needs to be done to launch them on a mass scale, including just making the public aware of their existence.

But that's far from the only challenge. Honda acknowledges that for any kind of mass adoption to occur, the hydrogen station infrastructure needs to expand drastically.

"Without the fueling, we can't support the cars. It's a little bit of a seesaw," Steven Center, Honda's vice president of its environmental business development office, told journalists at a roundtable event before the New York Auto Show.

There are only 34 hydrogen re-fueling stations in the United States, and 18 of them are in California, according to the US Department of Energy.

Despite that obvious challenge, Honda is still betting big on hydrogen. Center said hydrogen fuel cells are the "ultimate technology for the long term" because the cars boast faster re-fill times, perform better in colder weather, and offer longer ranges than electric vehicles.

We got a chance to get behind the wheel of the Honda's hydrogen-powered Clarity to get a real sense of the cars' potential. Here's what it was like: