In 2000: Future Stock : Sorry, cars won’t fly or walk on water. And they’ll still slurp up gas. But look for more luxury, lighter frames and better value.

The Greater Los Angeles Auto Show gleams through Sunday then brakes its short, annual reach into motoring for 1994.

But at technical centers and styling studios from Michigan to La Jolla, tomorrow continues. Designers and computers already are building for the next century and know precisely what our monthly payments will buy in 2000.

“We’re certainly far enough into it that we can’t talk about it,” says Jerry Hirschberg, vice president of Nissan Design International of La Jolla. Nor will he allow photographs of his team’s computer images. “But I can say it looks depressingly like a car. It has wheels. It doesn’t fly. It’s not at all like those coffee-table car books said it would be.”

Others say that despite the dictates of government, our turn-of-the-century motor cars will not be electric powered. Nor capable of traveling 80 miles on one gallon of gas. Certainly none will bear resemblance to the scientific, fictional, spacey, Odyssean vehicles of Arthur Clarke’s 2001.

As lobbies move to unplug California’s rigid electric vehicle legislation, cars powered by natural gas, propane or reformulated gasolines, will move to the ecological front.

Aluminum--the perennial backbone of air and space travel--will enjoy a new popularity in automobile construction. Shorter, lighter, narrower “City” cars will become popular with levels of comfort and quiet unknown to Yugo.

Experts predict air bags for every front seat and upmarket sedans offering optional back-seat bags by the end of the millennium. Air bags will be concealed in spaces no bigger than a fist, and will inflate into softer, better contoured and facially friendlier shapes the size of small comforters.

And anti-lock disc brakes will be standard equipment.

There will be 47 million car phones in use, or four times the current total. That doesn’t necessarily mean 47 million dawdlers and lane wanderers. For 21st Century car phones will be fumble-free and built into dashboards, with voice-activated dialing and integrated antennas sharing reception with the AM-FM radio.

And new windshields will aid night vision.

What looks like leather, squeaks like leather and smells like leather may very well be a tightly woven fabric. As there is keyless entry on 1994 cars, there could be keyless ignition 72 months from now.

And gas will only cost $2 a gallon.

Cars are as long, as low and as wide as they will get, believes GM designer John Schinella. Tomorrow’s buyers, he says, will want mid-size cars with brighter, more individual styling in fabrics, wheels and trim. Performance and handling will have a duality to satisfy young parents feeling for the safety of new families, and those driving alone and feeling their oats.

“Frankly, we haven’t been paying too much attention to what the public wants in its automobiles,” Schinella explains. “Now we’re listening and hearing people asking for more substantial automobiles of high-end character for less cost.

“For the year 2000 they want cars that feel good, smell good, look good . . . and work perfectly.”

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Schinella, here to chaperon Chevrolet’s 1995 Lumina and Monte Carlo at the auto show, knows where new automotive technologies are stirring--in high-tech aerospace and weapons laboratories where talents have been idled by defense cutbacks.

“You simply take that brilliance and sic it on to the problems of electronic drivetrains and lightweight materials that cost 50% less but wear 50% better,” he adds. “On the other hand, the customer might say they want the whiz-bang stuff, but are they really for it?

“Think about keyless ignition. Keys are a symbol, rather like a collar and tie: They survive as an essential of clothing although they have little practical purpose. In that light, I think the buyer of 2000 wants evolutionary, not revolutionary change.”

Buyers, however, just might be interested in an anti-theft microchip that will work in conjunction with a car’s cellular phone system.

“If the car disappears, you call the phone and ask the car for Global Positioning Satellite information,” says analyst and forecaster Herschel Shosteck, of Shosteck and Associates, Silver Spring, Md. “The car will tell you: ‘Here I am. Come and get me.’ ”

Yet, Nissan’s Hirschberg believes, tomorrow’s automotive developments will be restricted to “boldly evolutionary” in response to the consumer condition of “millenniumania.”

Society on its anniversaries, he says, tends to look back and assess the best and worst of all things. The Top Ten of the last decade. The Dubious Dozen of the past half century.

“Here we are approaching the end of a millennium. That has only happened once in Western culture, and I think it will impact us in very many ways,” Hirschberg says. “I think by the year 2000 there will be a standing still, a taking stock, a looking back at what humanity has done and saying: ‘Gee, we haven’t come very far, have we?’

“People will realize that the Gods of science and technology haven’t produced the Utopia we expected. People are weary of technology for technology’s sake. Now they are asking: ‘What is this product used for? What can it do for me? What does it not do for me?’ ”

So anticipate “a celebration not of the technology of cars, but a celebration of the people who are driving them . . . through human-oriented, low-tech devices indicating that a company is interested in people.

“Like the ubiquitous cup holder. Like the smokeless car with ashtrays as options. Also servomechanisms for every dimension of movement within the car and every movement of the car. The kind of things that when people see them, they say: ‘How nice, thank you. Why hasn’t someone done that before?’ ”

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Clearly as important as what will be by the year 2000, is what will not.

One consensus among car makers, mavens and the media at the L. A. show is that sales of electric vehicles (EVs) will be shorting out in 2001. No matter that California has mandated zero-emission (i.e. electric) cars that must form 2% of new vehicle sales in 1998. Representatives of the Big Three and the Overseas Others say it simply can’t be done. Not yet.

Battery technology, they protest, hasn’t budged in 90 years and crash programs are doing just that: crashing. They say it will be decades before affordable, safe, practical, efficient electric vehicles will be reducing Golden State Freeway traffic to a rush hour whine.

Grounded in fiscal realities, Ford announced Tuesday that it may scale back its electric vehicle program before pouring good money after bad battery technology. General Motors has already axed full production of its two-seat Impact EV.

Still, the California Air Resources Board--which ordered up the 2% solution as a well-intentioned effort to fight air pollution--doesn’t seem ready to blink.

Jacqueline Schafer, new chairwoman of the board, told an auto show luncheon that although the 1998 deadline would be reviewed this summer, she has this “bias toward retaining the rule” as a goad for EV technology.

Unimpressed, Assemblyman Bernie Richter (R-Chico) recently drafted a repeal. “The (EV) mandate is driven by ideology, not rationality,” he says. “I’m not for pollution, but this is madness.”

Not even EV builders are glowing with optimism for the rest of this century. At least, not when asked if their vehicles will contend in the car-pool lanes.

Bob Garzee, vice president of U.S. Electricar of Sebastapol, says companies within the Electricar consortium have built more than 55,000 EVs since 1946. But they remain niche vehicles such as “shuttle buses, utility company vehicles, meter maids . . . or second or third (personal) vehicles.”

He declines comment on EVs in the year 2000.

But Garzee predicts a “major movement toward AFVs (Alternative Fuel Vehicles) . . . if you want to move rapidly toward zero emissions.”

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Jack Smith agrees. Naturally. He is marketing manager of natural gas vehicles (NGVs) for the Southern California Gas Co., which has counted 2,000 gas buggies operating from Paso Robles to San Diego.

By 2000, predicts Smith, there will be 200,000 NGVs in Southern California. Purchase incentives and tax exemptions will wash costs of the conversion--about $3,000--to natural gas, which runs the equivalent of 80 cents a gallon.

NGVs burn 90% cleaner and performance is on a par with gasoline cars. The only downside is reduced range--less than 180 miles per tank for a Chrysler van--owing to skimpy storage space.

But there already is a refueling infrastructure in place--the 35,000 miles of pipelines that feed gas ranges in Los Angeles homes.

“My vision for 1998 is to expand NGVs out of the fleet market and into the consumer market,” Smith says. “The ultimate vision is an NGV in every garage and a refueling plant hooked into the gas system at every home.”

The San Bernardino Sheriff’s Office drives 100 natural gas patrol cars. Federal Express, Disneyland and Dy-Dee diaper service use NGVs. So how viable are such vehicles as an alternative to electric?

Says Smith: “Even (Southern California) Edison has a couple of natural gas vehicles.”

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Meanwhile, back at the drawing boards, there is a litter of ladybug cars leaning into the next century. Volkswagen has its two-door Concept 1--sketched at VW’s design center in Simi Valley--that will run on diesel or electric power. Writers already are claiming the Bug is back.

Honda has built one of these City cars. Even august, luxurious Mercedes-Benz has climbed down from its high horsepower to propose and display a snub-nosed, tall-tailed, hatchbacked cube for the 1998 model year.

The Vision A is three feet shorter than the smallest Mercedes built today. Powered by diesel, gasoline or electricity, the car develops 75 horsepower and barely tops 90 m.p.h., but gets almost 50 m.p.g.

These shorter, narrower, slower, lighter and gas-stingier City cars, says Erich Krampe, a sales executive with Mercedes-Benz of Germany, are building “a trend that will emerge into a real demand for the turn of the century.”

Not for the U.S., Britain or France, per se . But certainly for Los Angeles, London, Paris, he says, and any of the world’s densely populated areas: “Unlike other very small cars, (they will offer) traveling comfort, sound proofing and a high level of safety.”

Chrysler Chairman Bob Eaton doesn’t see a dramatic future for City cars, not even electrified ones. Not as long as gasoline remains an inexpensive fuel. Not as long as smaller engines become more powerful, cleaner and economical.

“There’s also no political will to do anything (change) about it,” he says.

Then with all factors considered, why buy a City car?

“Right,” Eaton says. “Who cares?”

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Land Rover has built aluminum-bodied sport utilities since 1948. Acura’s luxury NSX sports car is largely aluminum. The alloy is a contributor to the strength and speed of the military’s chunky HumVee.

By 2001, says Jane Lichter of the Aluminum Assn., Washington, D.C., more mundane cars will be using aluminum--and probably 500 pounds per vehicle compared to today’s 190 pounds.

At the L.A. show, Audi is displaying an all-aluminum space frame that will be the backbone and skeleton of its new A-8 luxury sedan. The car is said to be larger, lighter, stiffer, nimbler and stronger than its predecessor--thanks to totally recyclable aluminum.

Unfortunately, such high-class skillet metal costs three times as much as steel and production is riddled with vagaries. Such as heating the completed body shell to more than 425 degrees Fahrenheit for 30 minutes to optimize its strength.

But Lichter says it is the recyclability, and the profitability of the process, that is aluminum’s deep allure.

“The infrastructure to recycle aluminum already exists . . . recycling aluminum saves 95% of the energy required for new aluminum . . . and 66% of aluminum in cars is now recycled,” she explains. “Break down a car and you can sell the aluminum. You have to pay people to remove the other garbage.”

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Depressing though the reminder may be, baby boomers will be nearing retirement age by 2000. These consumers, says Jay Koblentz, publisher of Consumer Review, grew up in the van and sport utility era. He predicts they will demand luxury minivans “on car platforms, not truck frames:

“I see imminent-collision warnings, more anti-theft devices, and panic buttons you can press to lock the doors, flash the lights and sound the horn.”

But what of highways and freeways to handle a vehicular population that is growing by growls and blockages?

“Start charging a lot of money to get on ‘em,” Koblentz suggests. “Maybe even a luxury lane where you pay your price and go faster. Of course, I don’t know if the sign will say: ‘BMWs Only.’ ”

Jim Wangers of Automobile Marketing Consultants in Vista, sees more common sense in tomorrow’s vehicles. An increase in women buyers will produce kinder, gentler--and definitely lower--sport utility vehicles. Also door handles that don’t break fingernails and less macho pickup trucks.

And, he says, “Everybody will still be fighting desperately to avoid price increases, because the consumer has had enough sticker shock.”

Further growth in luxury cars and their equipment, he believes, is “very, very questionable. There’s so much luxury these days in high-line, mid-size cars like the (Chrysler) Concorde, Oldsmobile Cutlass, Buick Regal and (Infiniti) J30 . . . that I’m not sure the three-pointed star (Mercedes) or blue-and-white emblem (BMW) justify spending $50,000 anymore.

“I think the new C-Class Mercedes is saying what America is telling us: ‘Yes, we like Mercedes, but for $35,000, not $60,000.’ The (Chrysler) LHS is not quite as plush as a $45,000 Lexus or BMW. But it takes a real sophisticated eye to tell the difference, and that difference just isn’t worth $10,000.”

If there are new buzzwords for the future of automobiles, they likely are “global integration.” That’s the system of partial subsidiaries and conglomerates by which Ford in the United States owns Jaguar of England and a large piece of Mazda in Japan, while the Ford Festiva actually is made by Kia of Korea.

GM is a global player.

One division is working with its European partners on a smaller, less expensive luxury vehicle.

It is the LSE, which means Luxury Sedan Euro-Style.

By 2000, this quintessential American car could become the very first Cadillac built in Germany.