L.A. MAKES ITS LAST CAR : Area Is Still Big Player in the Industry : Manufacturing: Southland may no longer produce cars. But its contributions to the field--design centers and suppliers--are still vast.

Although Southern Californians no longer build automobiles, the world’s car capital still boasts a vigorous auto industry.

The shuttering of the GM plant marks another step in the region’s evolution from a blue-collar, auto-manufacturing region to one where research, design, engineering and marketing is done by white-collar workers.

As the industry’s assembly plants have disappeared from South Gate, Pico Rivera, the City of Commerce and now Van Nuys--erasing more than 15,000 jobs--thousands of other jobs have been created in places like Irvine, La Jolla, Newbury Park and Newport Beach.

Many Asian auto makers--Toyota, Nissan, Honda, Hyundai, Mazda, Mitsubishi, Suzuki and KIA, a Korean car maker that plans to enter the U.S. market next year--have set up national sales and marketing headquarters in Los Angeles and Orange counties.

Most of the world’s auto companies have set up design centers, where the cars of tomorrow are created, in the Southland. Two of the nation’s leading auto-consulting and research firms, J.D. Power & Associates and AutoPacific Group, are based in the region.

And there are countless producers, distributors and retailers of so-called after-market automotive gear, such as wheel covers and engine components. Superior Industries International, the biggest supplier of aluminum wheels to U.S. auto makers, is based in Van Nuys.

Much of General Motors’ revolutionary electric car, the Impact, was designed by independent engineers at AeroVironment Inc. in Monrovia and GM’s own designers at its Advanced Concepts Center in Newbury Park. (GM plans to build the car at an old Buick plant in Michigan.)

Moreover, California has played a big role in development of electric cars by mandating that 2% of cars sold by major manufacturers in the state be emissions-free by 1998. Thus, it is likely that electric-car research and related manufacturing will continue to grow in Southern California.

“Whereas the public may see the closure of the Van Nuys plant as signaling a diminishing interest by the auto makers toward the West Coast, the design efforts here by those same companies are increasing,” said Richard Hutting, president of Concept Center California, a car-design studio in Valencia that works solely for Ford Motor Co.

Hutting says there are about 20 such studios in Southern California, employing from five to 70 people each.

The Japanese were first to set up the design shops in the region; the domestic car makers followed about a decade ago. Besides the GM center in Newbury Park and Hutting’s Valencia shop for Ford, there’s Nissan Motor Co. (La Jolla), Toyota Motor Corp. (Newport Beach) and Mazda Motor Corp. (Irvine), to name a few. (Mazda’s highly popular Miata sports car was developed in Irvine.)

And lately, the European car makers have followed suit. BMW last year bought 50% of a car-design company named Designworks in Newbury Park, its first design effort outside Germany. Mercedes-Benz has its U.S. design center in Irvine, while Volkswagen and Volvo have design shops in Simi Valley and Camarillo, respectively.

This development isn’t surprising considering that Southern California is the nation’s biggest new-car market. Roughly 12% of the 12.3 million new vehicles sold nationwide last year were purchased in California, according to the state Department of Motor Vehicles and Ward’s Automotive Reports, a research firm.

The Japanese effort to design cars in California came after many located their U.S. sales and marketing operations in the region. It was a natural location, close to the seaports where Toyotas and Nissans bound for U.S. destinations arrived from Japan. The Big Three U.S. car makers--GM, Ford and Chrysler--followed because they were losing big chunks of the California market and wanted to know why.

A frequent explanation for the many auto-design shops in California is the state’s reputation as a trendsetter: car-buying habits are often a year or two ahead of the rest of the nation.

But those explanations oversimplify California’s role in the auto industry, said Christopher Cedergren, senior vice president at AutoPacific. The domestic car makers lost market share mainly because the Japanese set up bigger dealer networks throughout the state. In the Midwest and East, he said, the domestic auto makers have the advantage.

Southern California “is a trendsetter only because it is a big metropolitan area,” he said. “There is such a melting pot of different cultures and car buyers here.” By being close to the region’s drivers, Cedergren added, “you can tap into what a variety of different demographic groups will purchase.”

California’s design studios were virtually unheard of in the 1950s and ‘60s, when the Big Three still dominated U.S. car sales. Most automotive design decisions were made in Detroit.

GM, Ford and Chrysler also could afford in those days to have assembly plants in Los Angeles, Denver and Dallas to serve nearby markets. Even though it cost extra to ship parts to those plants from suppliers in the East, the manufacturers could absorb the expense and still earn a profit.

“It was terribly inefficient and costly,” said Bert Serre, a Ford spokesman.

But the automotive world changed dramatically over the next three decades. The American car makers, battered by the increasing strength of Japanese rivals, suddenly were struggling with fading market share, excess factory capacity and huge losses.

So the U.S. companies began wrenching restructurings in the 1980s to consolidate their plants. And when they looked at their operations, it was evident that most of their suppliers were in the Midwest and the East.

Small wonder, then, that there is now only one auto assembly plant west of the Rocky Mountains. That plant, a joint venture of GM and Toyota in Fremont, Calif., builds Toyota Corollas and Geo Prizms with parts shipped from Japan.

For the future, most auto makers will likely keep close ties with California. Hutting, of Concept Center California, said many of the companies’ design centers in California recently have been beefing up their staffs.

But whether or not the auto companies quickly and successfully utilize the new styles fashioned by their California designers remains to be seen.