Range and vision.

Is the auto industry working with antiquated technology? Energy guru Amory Lovins, co-founder of Colorado's Rocky Mountain Institute, thinks so. Lovins envisions a future car that is neither exclusively gas nor electric powered, but a hybrid of both. He calls this hybrid a "hypercar," and is one of its strongest champions. He predicts that hypercars will be able to drive from New York to Los Angeles on one tank of any fuel. They'll get 150 to 400 miles per gallon, and could possibly get much more." The hypercar, he says, will be "sturdier, safer, sportier, more comfortable, beautiful, durable and quiet -- and just generally nicer than present cars. They may even cost less."

Environmentalists once saw the electric car as the wave of the future, but now it's prospects are cloudier. The car's fortunes may be written in the stock price of the California-based US Electricar, perhaps the country's best-known producer. This spring it was trading at $1 a share, down 86 percent from $7 nine months earlier. Faced with possible collapse, the company decided to restructure. US Electricar still plans to build battery-driven cars-but it will now also make hybrids.

Battery-powered electric cars receive most of the media's attention during any discussion of the old gas guzzler, but prospects are looking increasingly bright for so-called hybrid-live technology. "There should be alternatives to [battery cars]," says US Electricar spokesman Leo Haggearty, "and probably the hybrids, at this point, are the best alternatives in the long run."

Hybrids are driven by electric motors mounted on each wheel. But rather than draw power from on-board battery packs like traditional electric cars, they depend on a motor-scooter-sized internal-combustion engine to generate juice. Result: cars you can tank up at the corner station, with the range, comfort and performance of a conventional internal-combustion powered vehicle -- and efficiency ratings of between 80 and 300 mpg.

It's not just the hybrid drive that creates such stellar performance. A series of efficiencies combine to produce a whole new automotive standard:

* Sharply reduced vehicle weight (as much as 75 percent), thanks to bodies made from molded composites (car polyaramid, for instance), rather than steel. A lighter body weight results in smaller and lighter brakes, wheels and other components.

* Regenerative braking. The motors on the wheels turn into generators during braking, capturing kinetic energy and storing it in a small battery pack or flywheel.

* More aerodynamic design, improving on current cars by 60 to 80 percent.

Such a car has not been built yet -- it exists in theory, on paper, and in prototypes. But a great deal of effort is being devoted to it. Chrysler, for example, is fielding its Patriot prototype, a gas turbine, hybrid-drive Formula 1 racer designed to compete at speeds of over 200 miles per hour.

A much larger effort is the unprecedented $10 billion collaboration between Ford, Chrysler, General Motors and the federal government to create a commercially successful hybrid. Called the Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles (PNGV), the 10-year undertaking to bud a prototype by 1998 and have hybrid cars on the market by 2003.

"There's nothing [auto manufacturers] would rather do than be able to obsolete the products that are already in the market/place," says David Cole, director of the Office for the Study of Automotive transportation at the University of Michigan. "If they could have a new product, they would kill for that kind of advantage."

Therein lies the crucial distinction between hybrids and electrics. Major manufacturers, despite prodding by legislation in California and the northeast mandating that zero-emission vehicles be on the market by 1998, have dragged their feet in developing and selling electric cars. They see electric vehicles as sluggish and irredeemably limited by short two and long recall times. Customers, they insist, don't want them.

Hybrid technology, however, may be more to their liking, but construction costs are a problem. "We certainly can build such a thing,' says Dr. Frank Field, a research associate at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. "But we can't build one that anybody could afford to buy. Ifs essentially our problem with electric vehicles, writ large."

Hybrid cars may solve some of the problems endemic to electric cars, but if they do it at great expense, they won't amount to much. By virtue of being much cleaner than contemporary technology, hybrids could do the environment a lot of good -- but only if people buy them.

"Customers are the people who really design cars," says Paul MacCready, chairman of Aerovironment, a Monrovia, California firm working with General Motors on hybrid prototypes. "To have a big societal effect, you've got to have cars that are the best for the customer."

And what do customers care about? Not efficiency. MacCready points out that the only liquid cheaper than gasoline in California is tap water. Gas accounts for only about 20 percent of the expense of running a car. If efficiency costs more up front, people don't want it.

But society wants efficiency because it means less pollution, and hybrid cars may be the most practical way of reaching that goal. 'If manufacturers start seeing that this is the way to make a car that meets the efficiency standards and turns a profit -- this is a formula that works says Timothy Moore, a Colorado-based RMI researcher.

Yet even if manufacturers do decide hybrids are worth pursuing, enormous barriers stand to prevent them from grabbing a sizable portion of the American market, which buys 15 million cars annually. Body shops, insurance companies, paint manufacturers and gas stations have built their businesses around steel cars and internal combustion engines. Wholesale changes in how cars operate and what they're made of will result in enormous ripples through the U.S. economy -- an economy that depends on automobiles for one-seventh of its production.

Manufacturing challenges are also huge. Steel cars are stamped out at a rate of 60 per minute; a typical car plant, costing $1 billion, produces 250,000 cars a year. But the composite bodies of hybrids take hours to cure, tying up production molds. Even if the demand exists for hybrids, producing them in volume would require a complete rethinking and retooling of the production process. Still, precisely that inertia can create opportunities. Car manufacturers worldwide are investigating hybrid technology. That's one of the forces propelling the PNGV; if American manufacturers don't cleave to hybrid technology, someone else might.

"[There is] an opening, maybe, for some of the car companies in developing countries like Korea or Malaysia," says Susan Helper, assistant professor of economics at the Weatherhead School of Management. "That's what Japan did in the 1970s. I think there is plenty of emerging room at the bottom."

Contact: Rocky Mountain Institute, 1739 Snowmass Creek Road, Snowmass, CO 81654/[phone]; Partnership for a New Generation of Vehicles, Room 7068, Herbert Clark Hoover Building, U.S. Department of Commerce, 14th Street and Constitution Avenue NW, Washington, DC 20230/[phone].