The Henry Ford of Electric Cars? : Industry: A controversial entrepreneur has persevered to get government and private support for his dream of making L.A. the center of a new auto industry.

In the summer of 1991, Lon E. Bell came about as close as a Caltech-trained scientist and conservative businessman can in the eyes of his peers to losing himself in a mire of muddled romanticism.

Like Don Quixote with a briefcase, Bell went knocking at the doors of 411 corporate executives in search of anyone willing to back a seemingly grandiose notion: that Southern California’s declining aerospace industry could find new life and enjoy a prosperous future by shifting its formidable brainpower to the development of the electric car.

With his year-old company, Amerigon, Bell proposed to lead the way by producing such esoterica as an energy management system to conserve the electric vehicle’s precious power supply. Who would join him to build the motor, the battery and the ultra-light frame?

Those 411 pitches yielded 411 rejections. With hope in the air for an economic upturn, Bell’s socially tinged agenda found little positive reception.

But, less than two years later, Bell’s relentless salesmanship has helped elevate the outlandish into the doctrine of his time. As the founder and guiding spirit of a business/government consortium called Calstart, he has amassed $20 million in public and private backing and assembled 40 companies from struggling family shops to Southern California Edison into a single collaborative endeavor.

Its goal is to supply companies such as Chrysler, Nissan and Mercedes-Benz with car parts made by as many as 55,000 workers who are losing their jobs at Hughes, Northrop and Lockheed.

“Our objective is to create an advanced transportation industry in California,” he says. “My hope and my dream is that cars will be manufactured here in large volume.”

Bell has exhibited great patience and perseverance before in his business career. It took him 20 years to make his first fortune on a device that can sense an automobile crash--most of that time simply waiting for the U.S. government to put its weight behind air bags.

His bullish arrival in the ultra-competitive world of high-tech electronics has not come without ripples. A handful of critics--among them entrepreneurs and engineers who have devoted their lives to electric cars--portray him as a self-promoting neophyte who has monopolized scarce government research and development money to promote his own second-rate technology.

Yet, for a growing audience of industrialists, labor leaders, politicians and academics, the articulate and savvy businessman has emerged as an icon for Southern California’s economic recovery.

“He stands a chance of becoming something like the Henry Ford of electric cars,” said Allen J. Scott, director of UCLA’s Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies, which helped launch Calstart two years ago with a study on the merits of regional high-technology consortiums.

Against such great public expectations, Bell stands as a private figure of stolid, folksy simplicity. A gray Acura Legend represents his extreme of personal pizazz--and he often switches it for the family Chrysler mini-van.

Home life is a controlled kind of Southern California casual. Bell was the kids’ soccer coach when they were young. A cherished memory is of growing Thanksgiving dinner at home one year--complete with the turkey--just so they would know where food comes from. He devotes Sundays religiously to two- and three-hour hikes in the San Gabriel Mountains with his wife, Hester, and two German shepherds. He allows himself one swear word, a mild “hell.”

Other than work itself, his only obvious indulgence is a taste for antique Oriental rugs. The attraction, he says, is the feeling of connection with anonymous weavers, possibly a team of women or a family, who toiled over it for 20 years or more.

Now, as since his youth, Bell’s defining trait is deadpan drive to be in business for himself.

While still an undergraduate studying mathematics in 1961, Bell formed a company with a couple of friends to pursue “some magneto-hydro-dynamic power generation stuff.” The team broke up without issue, and Bell went on to earn a Ph.D. in mechanical engineering. Then he revived the company, called Technar, to explore a promising new mechanical device called rolamite, which consisted of a cylinder wrapped inside a spring.

Technar found only one useful application for the quaint new tool: an extremely sensitive acceleration sensor that proved perfect for arming nuclear missiles. A defense contract produced welcome income, but not the satisfaction Bell sought.

“I certainly don’t consider myself a dove,” he said, but, “I just would prefer to work on things that in general save lives or help people and that’s what we focused on.”

By the early 1970s, Technar patented a rolamite trigger for the automobile air bag. Poised to seize what would become a lucrative worldwide market, the young entrepreneur was stymied for 15 years as the national air bag debate rumbled on in Detroit and Washington.

So Bell and his wife, parents of two daughters and a son, began what he now calls “our deferred gratification plan,” living in a modest house in Pasadena amid wall-to-wall cribs and basinets.

The blossoming of the domestic air bag market in the mid-1980s finally ended all vestiges of the Bells’ middle-class struggle. He sold his company to TRW and, in 1989, with their children gone off to college, the couple moved into a spacious modern house on six acres in the foothills of East Pasadena. Bell feels no embarrassment about being master of so many empty rooms.

“The more the merrier,” he said. “I have a sense of humor. I go and look at them and keep inventory.”

When he could have slid into graceful retirement among the anonymous rich, Bell decided instead to start from scratch again. On one of their Sunday hikes, he and Hester decided to risk $2.5 million to fund Amerigon.

Inspiration came from their son David, who had enlisted Bell as a consultant for a team of 25 University of Michigan graduate students who were building a solar car for international competition.

“I was very engrossed in their effort to design and build an extremely efficient vehicle that basically could run at 35 to 40 m.p.h. on the power of a typical blow dryer for your hair,” he said. “That influenced me to believe that electric vehicles could be practical and that it might be a venue for the transfer of technology in the aerospace community.”

Bell put together a business plan that forecast a $15-billion market by 2000, based on government policies promoting electric transportation.

After months of initial rejection, he met John Slifko, an equally driven industrial policy adviser on the staff of Rep. Howard L. Berman (D-Panorama City). Slifko was promoting federal sponsorship of a nonprofit industrial consortium to convert aerospace technology to commercial markets. Bell impressed him.

While Bell began to gain an audience in corporate board rooms, Slifko nurtured him in the political arena, helping win $6 million in grants, mainly from the state of California and the Department of Commerce--through legislation Berman sponsored. Calstart’s 40 member companies added $14 million in cash and services, even the smallest putting up $25,000 to get in.

With storybook symbolism, Calstart set out last June to incubate electric transportation in an idled Burbank defense plant handed over free by Lockheed for two years.

After briefly serving as Calstart’s unpaid president, Bell stepped aside last summer and left projects such as the electric commuter bus and electric charging stations to new President Mike Gage, the politically influential former director of the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power. Resuming full-time supervision of his own company, Bell guided the consortium’s signature project, building the $5-million Showcase Electric Vehicle.

Working furiously, Amerigon’s 25 employees got the showcase vehicle out for the Los Angeles Car Show in January. The three-seat, stylish blue sedan was a hit with the public, but disappointed electric car enthusiasts who judged it a costly clunker. Many of the high-tech wonders advertised in a packet of glossy literature--from Amerigon’s low-energy air conditioning system to the Hughes’ inductive charging unit--were not yet incorporated in the car. And rumor quickly spread that its motor was so weak that the car barely made it up a ramp into the truck that took it home.

“Why advertise if they don’t have it?” protested Harold Weinstein, a retired mechanical engineer who volunteered at Calstart, then quit in December after concluding that the showcase car was just a promotional tool for the yet undeveloped products of Amerigon and other companies that had anted up to join the club. “Where was the competition to get the best things? Wouldn’t that have been proper with public money?”

The sniggering turned to outrage when Bell sent the car on an expensive outing last month to a trade show in Geneva and prepared to show it again in Japan this week.

“We all seem to share the same opinion, that this looks like a potential black eye for electric cars coming out of Southern California and a waste of taxpayers’ money,” said Ken Koch, president of the Electric Car Assn. of Southern California.

Bell deflects such sniping from a higher plane. True, he readily concedes, the car would be a poor performer if tested now. That’s because the motor is still being developed.

A roadworthy car will not be ready until late this year. Even then, it should not be seen as a prototype for mass production but as a promotional tool to get automakers thinking of California as a source for advanced automotive components, made both by Calstart companies and their competitors.

“The fact is there are going to be 50 motors,” Bell said. “It’s incredibly competitive.”

That’s the way it should be, Bell believes. After all, he is striving to build an industry, not a car.