California dreamin'.

The future of personal transportation sits in a parking garage at Southern California Edison in suburban Rosemead, quietly recharging. But this unassuming Ford "Ecostar" van hardly looks like a vehicle I had flown 3,000 miles to see. I would have walked right past it, since the Ecostar looks like just another cargo van, if a company official hadn't come with me to tout the car as Ford's attempt to build a world-class electric vehicle (EV) to take on the gas guzzlers.

The Ecostar has an impressive resume. It runs on rechargable sodium sulfur batteries, can go from zero to 50 in 12 seconds--about the same as most of today's four-cylinder commuter cars--and it recharges in six to eight hours. Ford has leased Ecostars to electric utilities like Edison around the country, partly to unveil them to curious drivers like me.

With Suzan Sines, an EV specialist for Edison, in the passenger seat, I steered the Ecostar into the ferocious California traffic. It was not dramatically different from a conventional gas burner, although the near silence kept fooling me into thinking the car had stalled. EVs can be rattley and slow, but this one matched its fossil-fueled competitors. It wasn't just a developmental prototype; it was ready for commuting duty right now.

Even better is General Motors' (GM) Impact--practically a sports car with an 8.5-second 0-60 time, a 75-mph top speed, and a 100-mile range. It can accelerate faster than an Acura Integra.

GM and Ford did a damn good job of designing these cars, but they're trying just as damn hard not to build them in any great quantity. The Impact, once aimed at the production line, has been reduced to a 50-vehicle consumer test program. Ford, once gung-ho, has built only 81 Ecostars. Chrysler has sold only 50 of its electric vans at $120,000 each to electric utilities, though it now promises to produce them.

Even the heads of rival companies agree that GM and Ford have built state-of-the-art EVs as good as their fossil fuel burners. But Detroit wants to sabotage its own efforts by lobbying against the state regulations that will require people to start buying electric cars in the late 1990s. It's one of the great eco scandals of the decade.

In 1990, the California Air Resources Board (CARB) demanded that, by 1998, two percent of all new cars offered in the state by the big manufacturers have "zero tailpipe emissions." That number rises to five percent in 2001, and 10 percent by 2003. CARB's decision wasn't the fumbling of a New Age state still stuck on Jerry Brown's eco-visions. The greater Los Angeles basin has eight million cars spewing 1,246 tons of noxious pollutants into its atmosphere every day, the worst urban air pollution in the country. California isn't even close to meeting looming federal air quality deadlines. "The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), in effect, told us in February 1994 that if we didn't take strong steps, they'd come in and dictate our policies. And that could include things like no-drive days, which no one wants," says Juan Osborn, a CARB engineer.

California is not alone. In February, the Ozone Transport Commission on the eastern seaboard voted to adopt the California mandates for 12 states, from Virginia to Maine. The EPA must still approve this step. Florida, Colorado and Texas may sign on, too. All of these rules could add up to orders for tens of thousands of electric vehicles within the next decade.

But Detroit likes the profitable California auto market just as it is now. The American Automobile Manufacturers Association (AAMA) plans to "seek relief in California through all appropriate channels." The industry has fielded one of the largest lobbying forces in Sacramento that legislative regulars have ever seen. Ford lobbyist Steve Blankenship says bluntly, "We're going to ask that this rule be set aside." Ford directly lobbied California Governor Pete Wilson in a meeting set up by Robert M. Teeter, a company consultant who was George Bush's campaign chairman. But Ford CEO Alex Trottman insists the company is spending "some air fare and taxi cab rides but that's about it."

The Big Three say that electric car technology is not ready for the mass market, and that the mandates will force them to spend hundreds of millions on cars no one will want to buy. "You can't legislate innovation," says Kenneth R. Baker, head of GM's electric vehicle program--even though legislation created the Impact program. One high-ranking executive gave a smarter explanation: "Look. Ford, GM and Chrysler would spend $5 billion developing electric cars, and they'd need to see a 10 or 15 percent return on that investment to get the financing. It's all very speculative for them. But the money involved means they're willing to spend just about anything to make this legislation go away."

CARB remains caught between Detroit and Washington. "Detroit is saying our standards are too extreme, too technology-forcing," said CARB's Osborn. "But the EPA has told us that we're not going far enough. I think this is a pivotal year, when the car companies will finally have to decide whether they're going to go ahead and make electric vehicles."

I went to Southern California, the cradle of the nascent EV industry, to see the new electric cars for myself. Are they as impractical for the general public as Detroit claims? Are they as good as the fuel-efficient Honda Civic I drove from one entrepreneurial EV enclave to another?

Electric cars are nothing new. In 1900, 38 percent of the cars on the road were electric, and only 22 percent gaspowered. (The rest were steam-driven.) Electric cars remained popular, especially with women, until the 1910s, when the gasoline vehicle makers began installing easy-to-use electric starters, replacing the crankshaft handles on the front end that made starting gas cars an oily aerobic workout. Since then, all of the money and brains have gone into gas-powered vehicles, while the electric version has lain almost dormant. But in 1994 I found that the EV is a rapidly developing technology that, despite growing pains, is advancing almost as rapidly as the highly-vaunted information superhighway.

With CARB's mandates, California has become America's electric car bazaar, with dozens of startup companies competing for a place in the future market. The state is fertile ground for a new high tech industry, having lost hundreds of thousands of defense jobs in the last decade. All of this talent and energy may finally conquer the electric car's big hangups: range, price, performance and recharge time.

CALSTART, a nonprofit state-funded company that acts as an incubator for the electric car industry, is housed in a huge industrial building in Burbank that once operated night and day as a Lockheed aircraft assembly plant. At the electric recharging station outside the CALSTART office, I found the tall blond actor Ed Begley, Jr. "tanking up" his Florida-made Solar Car Company Ford Festiva. "I've been driving electrics since 1970, and exclusively since 1989, which must be some kind of record," he said. "I was sick of pollution and wanted to do something personal about it. Not all the cars I've had were great, but I've always made it home." Begley pointed at his Festiva: "That's a good car, but what they're going to show us today goes far beyond it."

CALSTART was conducting a rollout--the auto industry's version of a fashion show--of its new bodyless electric car chassis that entrepreneurs can build on to make a range of finished cars. This approach of making separate chassis and bodies is a throwback to the Detroit of the 1950s, but it makes sense for an electric car industry full of smaller, specialized companies. CALSTART's chassis, which boasts a projected 120-mile range and a 12-second 0-60 time, employs a host of California-made components, such as a lightweight tubular frame from Kaiser Aluminum, and a 65-horsepower motor from Hughes Power Systems, an L.A. subsidiary of GM. The energy control computer, the equivalent of the fuel injection system in a gasoline car, is made by Amerigon, which manages the CALSTART program. Dr. Lon Bell of Amerigon says that many vehicles--from small coupes to Taurussized sedans to jeeps--could be built on the chassis for a base price of less than $18,000 by the 1998 model year.

CALSTART president Mike Gage offered a pep talk. "The Big Three say electric cars are too expensive and not good enough; they're worried about making an inappropriate marketing decision. But we say it can be done, and it can be priced right."

Especially if government helps. Charles Imbrecht, chairman of the California Energy Commission, added: "Some with paranoid views are saying we're using the Clean Air Act to leverage heavy industry. But there's some truth to that. California is the largest focused automobile market on the face of the globe, and we need to recognize that and use it."

Use it to create jobs, for one thing. The Lockheed plant once employed 25,000; it was all but vacant when CALSTART began. Car manufacturers have left California in droves, closing so many factories that only a GM/Toyota plant remains in Fremont. Jim Quillin of the California Conference of Machinists, who once worked on the line at Lockheed, said, "There's not a lot of hope for more than 100,000 aerospace workers, and a lot of pain and suffering. But we've got a tremendous technical resource in these workers; let's start creating some new jobs before they all leave the state."

A small, nattily attired man sitting next to me turned out to be Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude, known as the godfather of the California electric car movement. In 1988, he helped launch the "L.A. Initiative" that brought Southern California Edison together with the city for a breathtaking goal: 10,000 electric vehicles, both vans and cars, on the streets of Los Angeles by 1995. Alas, the Swedish company that contracted to build these vehicles recently went bankrupt, but Braude's vision was highly inspirational.

"We decided we just couldn't wait for the Big Three to take action," Braude said. "I think it's inevitable that Detroit will build electric cars, but it may only do it after smaller companies prove that there's a market. You don't need to sell 250,000 cars the first year; you can sell 25,000 and make a profit."

The rubber meets the road in the factories and industrial buildings around L.A., like Green Motorworks in North Hollywood whose bright purple front office doubles as a camera rental store. Bill Meurer, a part time Hollywood cameraman, runs this enterprise, which sells new electric cars and also converts conventional gas cars to electric power.

Their cars range from handsome to mildly ludicrous. I was impressed by a row of professionally converted Volkswagen Rabbit convertibles, Pontiac Fieros and Ford Escort wagons. But the Danish Kewet El-Jet, $18,350 fully equipped, is not my vision of our automotive future--it's a square and squat little fiberglass box. White ones look like enclosed golf carts. Brightly painted, they look like...pretentious golf carts. But the Kewet is one of the few electric cars you can buy today that was designed to be an electric car from the start: Green Motorworks sees them as ideal commuter cars and handy runabouts for traffic cops and utility meter readers.

Driving the Kewet will be a familiar experience to Yugo owners. It's slow and noisy and has lackluster attention to detail summed up by primitive sliding, rather than wind-up, side windows. While most EVs are almost preternaturally quiet, this one offers a symphony of road noise and rattles.

The Kewet is blessed with a huge front window, but that didn't mean I could see out of it. We had a rare day of torrential rains in southern California, and the Kewet steamed up impenetrably. My Green Motorworks co-pilot kept assuring me the defroster would kick in, but we made it back to base by peering through a small hole created by frequent hand wipes. A technician then pointed out we hadn't engaged the defroster's fan, but even with it on the Kewet was as steamy as a Madonna video.

Green Motorworks has sold 25 Kewets, but this little box won't be the catalyst for mass migration to electrics. For that, I went to see the EVs from U.S. Electricar, based in Sebastopol, California. This publicly owned company has three manufacturing plants with 170,000 square feet of space and a subsidiary in Singapore. There are several hundred Electricars on the road now, but vice president Dave Brandmeyer says that's just the beginning. He gives tantalizing hints of big sales to come, culminating with news of recent meetings with GM CEO Jack Smith, who "wants to work with us to build thousands of vehicles and meet the mandate."

"But," I said, "I thought GM was trying to kill electric cars." Brandmeyer shrugs. The world's biggest car company obviously has many contingency plans, including worst-case scenarios.

Electricar builds everything from electric scooters to 22-passenger light transit buses. Its 15,000-square-foot Los Angeles plant, opened in 1993 as part of the "Rebuild L.A." effort, is located in the Watts Enterprise Zone. It has hired several dozen mostly long-term unemployed blacks and Mexican-Americans in the state Joint Training Partnership program to work on its converted Geo Prizms and Chevy S-10 pickups. It plans to produce 200 vehicles per month.

"Part of our battle is not to sell cars, but to lift people's consciousness," said manager Rodney Maddox. "Electric cars have brought jobs to this community, where it's hard to find any kind of job."

On a recent visit, I saw about 20 cars and trucks in various stages of construction, their hoods removed as they awaited electric components from Hughes. The process starts with brandnew gas cars purchased at local dealers. Workmen rip out the gasoline engines and ancillaries, which are resold as used parts. This obviously wasteful step is one reason electric cars cost so much ($39,000 for a Prizm; $43,000 for an S-10), but Detroit won't deliver stripped bodies to niche companies like Electricar.

I got to drive an Electricar Prizm in Torrance, at the high-tech factory of Hughes Power Control Systems, which makes the car's Dolphin electric drive unit and is, ironically, a GM subsidiary. Brandmeyer says the company aims to zero-out the electric car's weirdness factor. Its Prizm, aside from the garish graphics, is visually almost indistinguishable from its polluting original. The working fuel gauge is even retained, complete with a gas pump icon. Batteries are hidden in a channel under the car.

The Prizm starts sluggishly, but it gains power at around 20 mph. We soon were doing 80 mph--a very quiet 80, too. The Prizm was not quite as refined as the Ford Ecostar, but it was close. No one would feel like an eco-car martyr commuter braving the morning traffic in the Prizm.

Hughes has invented an ingenious plug for recharging the car, allaying the valid fears of people who don't want to be electrocuted at the power pump. It looks like a ping pong paddle and is so safe that Hughes has demonstrated it in a swimming pool. The company has also come up with electric charge stations that look just like gas pumps and accept credit cards for unattended urban locations.

Still, Hughes is a GM subsidiary. Rumors abound that the parent company will shut the plant down or fold it into GM's Delco unit. I asked marketing manager Fred Silver if he thinks GM will ever build the Impact, and he said yes, if costs can be brought down enough to make the car affordable. Without the Impact, however, Hughes' work could wind up helping only GM's competitors that use its innovations.

Like Hughes, many of the electric manufacturers around L.A. make components rather than whole cars. The biggest is Amerigon, based in CALSTART's building in Burbank. It has developed a computer system that can monitor the flow of electricity to make the car run 15 percent more efficiently. It has also addressed a persistent electric car problem: How do you get heat? Gasoline cars circulate the coolant water from the radiator after it comes off the hot engine, but most electrics don't need water cooling. Amerigon's answer is to heat and cool the driver, rather than the entire car interior. It's thermoelectric seat heater, an improvement on those already found in luxury cars like Volvos and Saabs, can reverse to become a seat cooler instead. But Amerigon VP Josh Newman was embarrassed when my test seat was disconnected. This is, as they say, a developing industry.

The EV's biggest booster is Southern California Edison, which has put 3,900 miles on an Ecostar and will soon lease an Impact. Bill West of Edison's Electric Transportation Department says that the utility could provide electricity for as many as two million EVs without building any additional plants, so long as people charge their cars during off-peak hours. Edison has some of the cleanest-burning power plants in the country, too, with most running on natural gas and hydro (plus one nuclear plant at San Onofre), allaying the complaints that EVs may only trade one polluting energy source for another, namely gas for coal. If electrics do catch on in a big way, Edison will consider buying geothermal and wind power from other producers to meet the demand.

"Look," said West, "California has lost 500,000 jobs, and we think there's a big economic opportunity here, up to 75,000 jobs in a brand-new market. We think that within the next five to 10 years we're going to see 50,000 EVs in service here." He was bemused at GM's claim that the public isn't interested in electric cars, noting that 10,000 Angelenos have signed cards seeking to drive the Impact. "People will drive as many as they can get."

Arguably, the best electric cars will be ultra-low weight hybrids, like those being studied by Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute in Snowmass, Colorado. Lovins envisions a car weighing only 1,300 pounds (compared to the average car's 3,500) and powered by an electric motor that gets its energy not from heavy batteries, but from a small gasoline engine that gets 300 miles to the gallon.

The bus is the ideal electric vehicle. Its wide, flat floor provides a perfect storage location for a giant battery tray, and it can be conveniently recharged at the bus company's terminal at night. Specialty Vehicle in Downey, California makes a wide range of electric buses which run for seven cents per mile, beating the diesel powered competition which costs 21 cents per mile. It uses a removable battery system mounted on the bus' third set of wheels at the rear, allowing workers to roll out the drained batteries and install freshly-charged ones in five minutes. Because diesel fuel spews out particulate matter that has proven to be carcinogenic, EPA regulations are forcing all buses to switch to alternative power--if not electric, then compressed natural gas or methanol.

The ideal Specialty customer, L.A.'s Metropolitan Transit Authority, has yet to buy any electric buses, but others aren't so shy. A 31-foot Specialty bus, designed to "kneel" to accomodate wheel-chairs, runs at Los Angeles International Airport, ferrying passengers from parking lot "C" to the main terminal. Santa Barbara has six Specialty buses in its municipal fleet, as does Chattanooga, Tennessee, where Specialty has a satellite operation. This summer the company's buses will replace diesel ones that shuttle between the Port Imperial Ferry in New Jersey and midtown Manhattan. Specialty has even bid to replace the fume-belching tourist buses at Yosemite National Park with electric runabouts.

Despite its electric successes, Specialty still makes conventional gas- and diesel-powered buses as its main product line. Marketing manager Ken Allison seems bitter about that. "Just allow us a level playing field with the oil lobby," he said. "The oil companies are in bed with Detroit, and their armies of lobbyists are still forcing an unfair tilt towards internal combustion."

Allison added that a few buses in test fleets won't launch the new industry or change Americans' mind about their daily transportation. With the Big Three lobbyists working to overturn the state mandates, EV entrepreneurs now have a harder time raising funds. Meanwhile, California is hemorrhaging employment. "Just down the road here we have the McDonnell-Douglas Space Center," he said. "Take a look at their parking lot--it's got room for 5,000 cars and they're lucky to have 100 there now. General Dynamics is being bought up, and that's costing us 6,500 jobs. The electric vehicle industry is here, it's viable and it will create jobs. But somebody better start buying them soon or it isn't going to happen."

Helpful Resources:

* Buyers Guide to Electric Vehicles costs $6 postpaid from Sun Toys, 1803 Mission Street $50, Santa Cruz, CA 95060/(800)SUN-TOYS.

* Calstart, 3601 Empire Avenue, Burbank, CA 91505/[phone].

* Electric Auto Association, 2710 St. Giles Lane, Mountain View, CA 94020/[phone]. It publishes a monthly newsletter, Current Events. Membership is $35 per year.

* Green Car Journal, 1334-D North Benson Avenue, Upland, CA 91786/[phone]. Subscriptions are $320 per year.

* Northeast Sustainable Energy Association (NSEA), 23 Ames Street, Greenfield, MA 01301/[phone]. It sponsors the American Tour de Sol, the most important electric car rally in the country.

THE FORCE IS WITH US: DRIVING AN ELECTRIC CAR

James Worden, the 26-year-old head of Solectria Inc., in Arlington, Massachusetts, started building cars in the 10th grade. He began the company in 1986 and now employs over 18 people. But Worden still spends as much time as he can in a racing suit, although he's no horsepower-crazed hot rodder. He travels the growing EV race circuit. In March, he drove his Solectria Force EV to first place in the stock car category of the Arizona Public Service Electric 500, winning for the third year in a row.

I saw Worden's champion car tucked into a corner of the Massachusetts factory early this year. The racing numbers, rollbars and stripped interior can't hide the fact that the Force started life as a humble Geo Metro. Converting Geos is, for the moment, Solectria's main activity, but much bigger things are planned.

The '93 Force GT test car used by the New England Electric utility is the Ferrari of the fleet, with two 26-horsepower AC motors and 21 nickel-cadmium batteries. A similar model in Solectria's catalog costs $59,350--not cheap, considering the car's Metro origins.

Like most electric cars, the Force is a rolling advertisement for itself. The test car had an electric cord and socket painted on its flanks and other gaudy graphics; otherwise it looked like a Metro that had lost its exhaust pipe on a rock. The back seat is also missing--replaced by the bulky nickel-cadmium batteries, though Forces with more compact lead-acid power are available with four seats.

Electric cars don't "start" like gasoline ones do. You turn the key to unlock the steering wheel, then on a small dash-operated switch with three positions, forward, reverse and off, you turn the switch to forward and... nothing at all happens.

Electric cars also don't "idle"; at rest they consume nothing at all, which makes them ideal for urban commuting. The only life comes from the flickering amp and volt meters mounted in place of the gasoline fuel and temperature gauges. Even more important is the digital amp hour meter which is like a fuel gauge, but it looks like a taxi meter, counting up your discharge until it's time to plug in again.

Hit the "gas" pedal and the Force GT just starts moving forward. The acceleration is reasonably brisk. A Force GT will do 0-30 in 6.5 seconds, 0-50 in 15, and if that doesn't sound fast, remember that a standard Metro takes about 18 seconds to get to 60 mph. ("Performance is not the baby Geo's strongest selling point," says Popular Mechanics).

The GT keeps accelerating right up to 70 mph. It did fine in the traffic on Route 93. The first sign of electric car weirdness came when lifting off the "gas." Electric cars don't brake like gasoline cars, which leave the gears engaged to slow down their momentum; the Force uses the spinning gear shaft to charge up more electricity, a system called regenerative braking. Lift off the pedal and the Force will roll to a stop very predictably, which, with practice, lets the driver use the brake pedal (unchanged from the Geo) very sparingly.

A conventional Geo Metro gets 58 mpg on the highway, making it the most fuel-efficient car on the road. Still, it runs for five cents a mile, says Arvind Rajan, Solectria's vice president of planning, while the Force hits the road for 1.5 cents a mile. Solectria has ambitious plans to build 20,000 wholly new electric cars a year, not just Metro conversions. Contact: Solectria, 27 Jason Street, Arlington, MA 02174/ [phone].

BEYOND ELECTRIC

The ultimate solution for cars may be fuel cells, not batteries. Fuel cells split hydrogen molecules to generate electricity and emit only water vapor. They run much longer than batteries, allowing a greater driving range. NASA has used fuel cells on space flights, but many experts say another 10 to 15 years are needed to develop them for general cars. Energy Partners of West Palm Beach, Florida, backed by 76-year-old John Perry Jr., has built the "Green Car" prototype with funding from the California South Coast Air Quality Management District and the U.S. Department of Energy.