COLUMN LEFT/ TOM HAYDEN : Here’s a Way to Get Jobs and Clean Air : L.A.’s mayor could incubate the electric-car industry--why give it up to foreigners?

It was midnight on the 101, leaving downtown Los Angeles, when the batteries in my new electric car gave out. The charge needle fluttered down to 0 while I sheepishly and anxiously eased the vehicle to the shoulder.

Safely there, I sat questioning my judgment. Was I going to get killed for the principle of driving this clean-air car, a converted Ford Escort? Or was the car innocent, and the fault mine for pushing the vehicle past its 50-mile range?

An AAA driver named Wendell hauled me 25 miles. He routinely hauls cars out of gas, he said, but never a car out of electricity. He explored my 18-battery system, which replaced an internal combustion engine, with curiosity. “My truck gets about 12 miles to the gallon,” he finally said, “I hope yours is the future.”

The electric car is not a futuristic fantasy. A converted model costs between $15,000 and $20,000. It goes 60 m.p.h. and has a range of 50 miles before it needs recharging in my garage at night.

Los Angeles might become the clean-air capital of the world. While some say jobs are threatened by too much environmental protection, the reverse is true with electric cars. State air officials have mandated that 10% of all new cars sold in California in 10 years--as many as 200,000--be “zero-emission.” The same standards nationally could mean 1 million electric cars.

Already, a coalition of aerospace and utility companies, called Cal-Start, has received $20 million for research and development of this “advanced transportation” industry.

But can corporations hooked on bigness think small? The chairman of Unocal doesn’t. “Who wants to be cruising around our roads and highways in an oversized golf cart,” he groused to a petroleum refiners’ convention last year.

There have been embarrassing false starts. In 1989, the state Energy Commission put 30 “model” electric vehicles in fleets around the state. Dubbed “lead sleds,” these 8,600-pound GM vehicles seemed designed to fail. Nearly $1 million in ratepayer money was squandered.

Next came the Clean Air Coalition, which pledged to develop an “LA 301” prototype in 1991 and 30,000 cars by 1995. At the 1991 unveiling, someone forgot to charge the car, which had to be dragged to its press conference by flatbed truck. The initial private investors are $10 million short, and the L.A. Department of Water and Power has spent $4 million with no car to show.

Today, not a single American auto-maker is committed to producing an electric car, which leaves the Japanese and Europeans in the driver’s seat. The Japanese plan an annual production capacity of 200,000 electric vehicles in the next decade. By contrast, Cal-Start has positioned itself only to sell components.

It is simply mind-boggling that California environmental laws have created an opportunity for a jobs-rich, non-polluting industry that will be exploited in Bonn, Stockholm and Tokyo, but not in America.

To build electric cars here requires a shift from the laid-back, cost-plus mentality of Southern California’s defense behemoths. It would be like entrusting the nuclear industry to develop solar power or expecting a Hollywood studio to produce a film like “El Mariachi” for $7,000. The electric car is perhaps the clearest challenge for the Clinton Administration’s hope of converting to efficient industries.

For Los Angeles, the electric-car industry could create as many as 50,000 jobs. While that is only 10% of the jobs lost since 1990, such electric-car jobs could form the core of a regional “industrial policy” that might employ many more. Despite recession, the region is flush with investment capital in one sector--$180 billion has been approved by voters for modern transit systems in the coming three decades. It is crucial that these dollars be spent on alternatives like the electric car, not simply on big-ticket rail projects--or boondoggles--that create few long-term jobs for Los Angeles residents.

At least three mayoral candidates--Michael Woo, Richard Katz and Nick Patsaouras--speak supportively of electric cars. Laissez-faire enticements will not be enough. Woo wants to convert the city’s 600 “meter-maid” vehicles to electric ones. Why stop there?

A new mayor can incubate the electric-car industry here. With existing transit funds, Cal-Start and Rebuild L.A. can begin the conversion process now and set a national example. At the Cold War’s end, why not hire displaced defense workers and the inner-city jobless in a peaceful drive toward clean air?