Firms turning on to electric-car charging stations.

Group talking with highrise, shopping centers owners

The Calstart consortium will likely announce by the end of the month that a number of Los Angeles businesses have agreed to install charging stations to replenish the batteries of electric vehicles driven onto their premises, according to group officials.

The announcement will arise from negotiations now under way with highrise owners and tenants, shopping centers, small businesses and other enterprises interested in buying the juicing technology, according to John Schumann, program manager for the Calstart effort.

Subsidies are being offered in some cases, Schumann noted.

A goal of Burbank-based Calstart -- a consortium of 40-plus private and public enterprises promoting advanced transportation -- is to set up 140 electric powering installations by the end of 1993. Sixty are planned just in the city of L.A. Calstart's overall goals include revitalizing California's aerospace industry and streamlining its transportation systems while cutting smog.

This project primarily serves to educate the public and Calstart officials on how to market the new transportation energy. It is also hoped to jump-start battery-powered vehicle sales.

"We expect mass-produced electric vehicles to be on our streets by the mid-1990s, and you have to have the infrastructure in place to charge them," said Schumann.

"Obviously, if the consumer has no place to charge the electric car, he's not going to be amenable to buying it in the first place," said George Bellino, manager of market development for Torrance-based Hughes Power Control Systems. The division of Hughes Aircraft Co. -- a Calstart member -- manufactures chargers.

Hughes' parent company, General Motors Corp., has directed Hughes to market infrastructure equipment for nationwide sales while GM readies its first electronic vehicle, the Impact. However, the plastic-bodied car, which GM had vowed to produce by the mid-1990s, was sidetracked indefinitely last month by a cost-conscious GM board of directors.

Government moves are also driving electric vehicle sales forward, although somewhat slowly, according to critics.

The state has mandated that 2 percent of all vehicles sold in California by 1998 be non-polluting, and 10 percent by 2003.

Calstart is hoping more than just government agencies embrace electric vehicles and is seeking a cross-section of business partners to gain diverse marketing feedback.

"We'll get a better, broader understanding of how well the public will accept these, what are their driving habits" and other marketing information, which would shared with other Calstart members, said Schumann, who is also the L.A. Department of Water & Power's manager of research and development for power systems.

"We'll let the consumer and the market decide what type of chargers they like," he added, noting that several manufacturers' units are being offered, including Hughes'.

The DWP, a Calstart founder, is leading the charger effort. That utility, of course, looks forward to increased electricity sales. Ditto for Southern California Edison Co., which sells electricity to most other L.A. County businesses and co-sponsors the $5.7 million effort to promote chargers and other infrastructure to support new transportation means.

So far, Calstart has produced a demonstration electric vehicle that rolled out of its Burbank workshop Dec. 1. It contained components made by Hughes Power Control, El Segundo-based International Rectifier Corp. and Santa Fe Springs-based Trojan Battery Co. and was conceived to showcase their components, along with those of other California manufacturers.

In November, Hughes shipped its first charger to Pacific Gas & Electric Co. to be used for electric cars at a Bay Area Rapid Transit District subway station in the San Francisco Bay area. Thirty-nine more chargers will be shipped to other utilities and to General Motors, said Bellino. All are "proof-of-concept" models to be used in pilot situations to reap research and marketing information.

Several competing designs of electric cars are being displayed at the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show this week.