Ready! Set! . . . Charge? : * Environment: With stricter emissions standards on the horizon, experts say the electric vehicle may be the car of Southern California’s future.

In the automotive industry’s early days, they were perceived as feminine cars: Quiet, gentle and limited in power when compared to the sputtering internal-combustion “masculine” counterparts that had to be cranked into action.

Then they settled in as a hobby for back-yard mechanics who liked the mechanical tinkering of replacing the gasoline engine with an electric motor.

In the 1970s, they were adopted by hard-core environmentalists who reveled in the personal statement of a non-polluting vehicle even though it limited them to life in the slow lane. More recently, they became known as the toys of ecologically correct celebrities who see themselves as setting the example for a nation that needs to shake its political dependency on foreign oil.

But now, electric vehicles (EVs)--whose time seems to keep coming and going--are here to stay.

The reason is dirty air. Recent toughening of the state’s emissions standards will force the automobile industry to add electric cars to the mix they sell in California, starting with 2% in 1998 (an estimated 40,000) and rising to 10% in 2003 (an estimated 200,000).

And that’s just the start.

Surveying the decade ahead, experts predict that the role of EVs will range from filling an important niche as a second family car to being the machine that can reshape Southern California. Los Angeles, in fact, has already announced plans to become the first “EV Ready” city in the world.

There is no question that the electric vehicle, which most people still think of as a golf cart, is going to change our lives. They will reshape not only the design, manufacture and marketing of the automobile, but also the way we live and drive--from consolidating errands to remembering to plug the car in each night.

Currently, an estimated 1,000 electric vehicles drift among Southern California’s 8.5 million commuters. Almost all have been converted from conventional automobiles.

These numbers are destined to rise dramatically, thanks to an unprecedented intersection of environmental consciousness and revolutionary air-quality regulations.

The EV is en route. Following the groundwork of back-yard technicians and environmentalists is a hefty crowd of manufacturers, consultants, designers, engineers, utility researchers, battery experts, technicians, legislators and local, state and federal regulators. Many are looking at the EV seriously for the first time, inspired by tough new emission standards set last September by the state Air Resources Board.

“We have a whole host of forces converging toward a transportation future that’s going to be very different from the present,” says Monty Hempel of the Claremont Graduate School Center for Politics and Policy, who directed a 1987-89 feasibility study on electric vehicles in Southern California.

While no commercial auto maker has produced a competitive EV in terms of price, range and acceleration--although every major auto maker now has one in the works--he says refined technology has already attracted those drawn to the environmental benefits or to the technological simplicity.

“If auto manufacturers want to sell cars in California 10 years from now, they will have to provide electric in the mix,” he says.

It is clear, Hempel says, that selling electric cars requires a departure from the traditional marketing pitches of power and speed.

“We need to appeal to car buyers as citizens, as parents, as keepers of the planet who should start thinking about the consequences of their actions,” Hempel says.

“There’s a traditional Southern California machismo, a ‘love for muscle,’ that’s not going to go away, but I think it’s going to be eroded.”

Why Go Electric?

If the vision of a non-polluting car seems attractive to a driver seeking to wage a personal war on pollution, it has become downright compelling to regulatory agencies charged with meeting federal air quality standards.

Because motor vehicles produce approximately 60% of the hydrocarbons, carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide and other pollutants that combine to produce smog, an emission-free car clearly beckons as a significant prospect.

The EV, with a 50- to 60-mile range per battery charge, could be the perfect in-town car for Southern Californians, whose average round-trip drive is 24 miles.

Hempel, whose 1989 study predicted slow EV commercialization, has stepped up his timetable because all air quality aspects--from traffic volume to pollution counts--have intensified.

“With each passing year we get a little more precise sense of the penalties we pay for polluted air,” Hempel says, citing a recent Harvard University study on deaths attributed to air pollution.

In response, regulatory agencies are tightening standards even more dramatically. The South Coast Air Quality Management District, battling the nation’s dirtiest air, recently updated its clean-air plan to project that 17% of all vehicles be electric by the year 2010.

Even more significant, says Hempel, is action by the state Air Resources Board, which is responsible for mobile emission sources. Last September, the board approved a timetable that requires certain percentages of vehicles sold in California to be zero or low emission. It was the first such action taken by any state.

Although the auto industry has dabbled with EV research since the 1970s, the notion of accessible EV commuter cars rolling off Detroit assembly lines is met with considerable skepticism among veterans.

Says Michael Hackleman of Venice, editor of Alternative Transportation News: “Based on what I’m seeing and hearing right now, I think their cars will be expensive, cumbersome and limited in what they can do. The companies are too big to do really creative work.”

But Air Resources Board spokesman Bill Sessa says the auto industry is enthusiastic and ready to get serious about EVs, now that new regulations have equalized economic risk and boosted consumer interest.

“It’s one thing for a government agency to be dictating a change like this to the car industry,” he notes, “but it’s even more dramatic when there are so many potential customers who are equally ahead of the car industry.”

Customer interest has not gone unnoticed. When GM introduced its Impact electric prototype at the Greater Los Angeles Auto Show 18 months ago, public response was so great the company accelerated its production timetable.

“Everyone loved it. They wanted to buy one on the spot,” says Jean Crocker of GM, which is now producing a “street version” of the sporty Impact. The Impact accelerated from 0 to 60 m.p.h. in eight seconds with a range of 125 miles in test runs.

“Also it’s an environmental car,” says Crocker. “The lead-acid batteries are highly recycled, and the entire vehicle presents the cutting edge in recyclability.” GM won’t reveal many more details but expects to have the car in showrooms by the mid ‘90s, she says. “We don’t announce volumes, but we’ll make as many cars as we can.”

How to Go Electric

Bob Hadden, 41, of Redondo Beach drives an electric vehicle--a silver ’88 Ford Escort hatchback that he plugs into an outside wall at his home every night for recharging. A computer counselor, Hadden is trying in his spare time to build a business selling electric vehicles. He spends 20 to 30 hours a week calling people, knocking on doors and doing test drives.

He hasn’t sold any yet but says he is hopeful: “It has taken 90 years to set up a whole infrastructure for cars as we have them now, and we’re in a transition stage in the evolution of the automobile. I get a good response.

“If I had sufficient funding, I would lease a vacant lot and stick as many cars as I could on it and get some Cal Worthington kind of publicity to get people to come and buy them. I would like to see a very aggressive marketing of electric cars.”

Hadden is in the right place. It’s not only the auto industry that has been kicked into action by the new regulatory push to get serious about electric vehicles.

In Sacramento, the Air Resources Board is implementing new legislation to give EV buyers an income tax credit of up to $1,000 and partial sales-tax exemption.

Throughout California, utility companies are designing incentive programs, such as deductions for recharging at night when the electric power load is reduced.

But nowhere is the red carpet being unrolled more feverishly than in Los Angeles.

“We’re saying ‘Welcome Back’ to the electric car after eight decades of neglect,” says Glenn Barr, deputy to Los Angeles City Councilman Marvin Braude.

Braude is a seasoned environmentalist who has long maintained that we can’t clean the air without fixing the car. He has spearheaded the effort with seed money from the Department of Water and Power and Southern California Edison.

Under the Los Angeles Vehicle Initiative, Braude in 1988 sponsored a worldwide competition for the design of 10,000 electric vehicles for Southern California drivers. That resulted in a contract with Clean Air Transport, a Swedish-English consortium that is designing a hybrid gasoline-electric, four-passenger sedan. The car will be priced in the mid-$20,000 range and franchised through local automobile dealers.

In a related move, and recognizing that a major drawback to EV commuting is battery charging, the City Council in July passed a series of recommendations to make Los Angeles an “electric vehicle-ready city.” The plan includes massive installation of battery-charging outlets at public and private parking facilities throughout the city.

Says J. P. Ellman, a City Council legislative analyst: “We’re definitely breaking new ground here--I don’t think anybody has ever looked at a whole city and tried to make it structurally supportive for electric vehicles.”

What’s Ahead

As the public sector makes way for a new age of transportation, the Southern California business community also is courting the EV.

A major UCLA report earlier this summer envisions California as the key manufacturing location for the new electric car industry--soaking up jobs and expertise lost by shrinking aerospace contracts--and recommends a major push in that direction.

The report, released by the Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies and funded by a consortium of utilities, also stresses the unique, non-polluting ability of electric vehicles.

The comprehensive report concludes with a call for political leadership to develop the state and local policies to give California the jump-start it needs: “It’s crucial that the seeds be planted soon because the technology is currently being explored in mamy other places by many other parties.”

In Washington, Rep. Howard Berman, (D-Panorama City) announced last week that he would introduce a bill to fund research and development of electric cars and clean transit vehicles. Berman’s Advanced Transportation Competitiveness Act is structured to encourage domestic investment in the fledgling industry.

Says Berman aide John Slifko: “We’ve been concentrating on trying to get the production and manufacturing here. We think California can build EVs quicker and better than Detroit.”

Slifko has a futuristic vision of the role such a vehicle can play: “The (gasoline) car is the machine that contributed to our present urban design. When we look at this new vehicle, it can again change the world.

“What we’re saying is that we need to look at new forms of mass transit everywhere. We look at electric shuttles, at hydrogen-fuel cell buses, at high-speed magnetic levitation trains. We can start to integrate various forms of transportation planning and to combine environment, energy, land use and transportation planning all at the same time.”

Such visions are well down the road. Nevertheless, longtime champions of electric vehicles think they are beginning to emerge from the storybook stage.

Right now, says Cindy Greenwald, director of air quality for the Los Angeles Department of Environmental Affairs, electric vehicles are being viewed as “an essential part of our clean-air program.”

And as the city continues to feel the environmental pinch, the notion of a non-polluting vehicle is increasingly attractive.

“We have two traffic problems in Los Angeles--pollution and congestion. I’m not expecting everyone to buy an electric vehicle, but I’d love it if they did,” she says.

“Then we’d only have one problem--getting half of them off the road.”