Driven by an Electric Dream

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 elevated 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 with car parts made by as many as 55,000 workers who are today 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’s bullish arrival in the ultra-competitive world of high-tech electronics hasn’t 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, the private Bell stands as a figure of stolid, folksy simplicity. A gray Acura Legend represents his extreme of personal pizazz--and at that he often switches it for the family Chrysler minivan. He foresees a trade-in--as soon as there’s an electric car on the market.

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 epithet, 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, toiling over it for 20 years or more.

Now, as since his youth, Bell’s defining trait is deadpan drive. Even at Caltech, he was considered a little boring. His single-minded goal, classmates say, was to start a business as soon as he could.

“It was something that was crystal clear to him from some time before I knew him,” said Allen Gillespie, who recalls his difficulty recruiting Bell, a high school track star, to run on an intramural team. “Some people never have a doubt about what the right path is. That is the way it was for him.”

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 that consisted of a cylinder wrapped inside a spring.

Technar’s employees found only one useful application for the quaint new tool: an extremely sensitive acceleration sensor that proved perfect for arming nuclear missiles upon re-entry. 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, then 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.

Technar found a small niche devising high-tech widgets for quickly developing markets, among them the fast-start glow plug for the diesel engine--much in demand during the OPEC oil embargo. All the while, it kept an eye on the auto safety field, bringing out the pendulum mechanism that engages seat belts in a crash and securing a dominant share of the European and Japanese air bag sensor markets before the decade ended.

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-style 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 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 forecasting a $15-billion market by the year 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 Berman (D-Panorama City). Slifko was promoting federal sponsorship of a nonprofit industrial consortium to convert aerospace technology to commercial markets. Bell impressed him.

“Here was a guy of great ethical standards, extremely intelligent, knows the auto industry, knows entrepreneurialism,” Slifko said. “He understands the Japanese system well. He understands the California aerospace industry. He’s one of the finest presenters I’ve seen in the industry. Lon has a personality that’s a little bit like a pediatrician. It’s soothing.”

While Bell began to gain an audience in corporate boardrooms, Slifko nurtured him in the political process, 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 in 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 leaving 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.

As Amerigon grew to 25 employees, its inner workings reflected its owner’s dual style: hard-driving executive who commands lifetime loyalty and patron of the up-and-coming young. Key lieutenants are Gillespie and Robert W. Diller, two former Caltech classmates who joined Technar 20 years ago and have been with Bell since. Counterbalancing their experience, Bell brought in the “Michigan kids,” five alumni of the University of Michigan solar car team.

Working furiously, this team 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 Hughes’ inductive charging unit--weren’t yet incorporated in the car. And rumor quickly spread that its motor was so weak 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, if tested now the car would be a poor performer. That’s because the motor is still being developed.

“It is a living vehicle, and will constantly be upgraded,” he said.

A roadworthy car won’t be ready until late this year. Even then, it shouldn’t be seen as a prototype for mass production, but as a promotional tool to get auto makers thinking of California as a source for advanced automotive components.

“The program is not intended to pick one technology over another,” Bell said. “If there are other competitive technologies, wonderful.”

Bell thinks Calstart will help them all. It’s an industry he strives to build, not a car.

“I guess I kind of equate his predicament in the technology arena to that of Peter Ueberroth with Rebuild L. A.,” said Rod Hanks, president of the Valencia aerospace firm H. R. Textron. Although Hanks decided not to join Calstart because of the $25,000 entry fee, he bears no resentment. “He’s out there as a change agent, and he’s found himself sailing into uncharted waters, so you can’t really be critical of his intent or his service.”

Like Ueberroth, who is a man with a mission who can’t be kept waiting, Bell careens through his working days in a quiet corporate frenzy. In a Spartan office where not long ago Lockheed scientists plotted machines of war, he works from 8 a.m. till late in the evening, deferring unfinished work to his home for after-hours and weekends. He expects the same of his staff. He once phoned a stunned associate at 8 on a Saturday night to suggest that they meet at Calstart--in 20 minutes.

As teams of young employees drop in to seek his guidance on their projects, Bell adroitly steps back and forth from the work of Calstart--a consortium of 40 companies--to the work of his own company. At one moment, he’s questioning one of the “Michigan kids” on the performance of a new motor for the showcase car. Then it’s downstairs to the laboratory for 10 minutes in a hotbox, testing Amerigon’s variable temperature seats. Later, he debates with Vice President Josh Newman on the merits of Calstart’s producing an electric car chassis--all the working parts without the body.

And he spends almost an hour with a young team leader working out wrinkles in what should be Amerigon’s first paying product--a navigating system that gives out street directions in spoken English.

So what does that have to do with the electric car?

Not much, he concedes, though it could lead the driver to a charging station. More to the point, there’s a market for it now as auto makers push to introduce the personal navigator in the 1994 models. Wouldn’t it be better if it came from Burbank than Tokyo?

It’s been three years since Bell staked his personal fortune on a noble experiment. He’s proud that his earlier work saved lives. He’d be prouder still if he could save a failing industry. But, above all else, he’s a businessman.

“I want to make a lot of money out of it,” Bell said. “That’s the report card.”

Personal Highlights Name: Lon E. Bell

Age: 52

Biography: Born in San Francisco. Graduated from Caltech with bachelor’s degree in mathematics in 1962, master’s degree in mechanical engineering (specializing in rocket propulsion) in 1963, and Ph.D. in mechanical engineering in 1968. Founded Technar in 1967. Developed fast-start glow-plug for diesel engine, retractor mechanism for auto seat belts and crash sensor to activate air bags. Captured dominant share of world market for those products. Sold Technar to TRW in 1986. Founded Amerigon in 1991 to develop advanced automotive products. Founded Calstart in 1992 as a nonprofit, government-supported consortium of companies to apply aerospace technology to the electric transportation industry.

* Quote: “My interest was not to be a scientist. My personal interests were to broadly utilize technology and ideally to utilize it in ways that had a positive impact on people’s lives, such as the seat belt mechanism and the air bag mechanism, and now the electric vehicle.”