LOS ANGELES - Despite plunging gas prices, the auto industry's move to greener and more fuel-efficient technology appears to be gaining momentum with a growing number of manufacturers betting on a market for cars, trucks and crossovers running entirely on battery power.
The transformation is being driven home at the Los Angeles Auto Show which runs until the end of the week and showcases a new focus on "electrification," the industry buzzword for supplementing or replacing the internal combustion engine with electric alternatives.
"The end-game is zero emissions," declared Carlos Ghosn, the CEO of Renault/Nissan alliance, during his keynote address last week.
The French-Japanese group is developing an assortment of electric vehicles from minicars to 4x4s in collaboration with a number of countries - Israel, Denmark and Portugal and the United States.
The ambition is to bring the cars to the mass market by 2012 and Ghosn has said Nissan's electric vehicle program is one of the few places the company won't cut as it struggles with the worsening global slump in car sales.
The primarily problem remains the battery - as it did when Henry Ford tried to develop a competitive electric vehicle with the help of his old friend Thomas Alva Edison a century ago. The chemical storage devices provide limited range and long charging cycles, add lots of weight - and cost a lot.
But industry leaders are hoping that the latest generation of batteries - especially variations of the lithium-ion technology used in modern cell phones and laptop computers - will solve such problems.
The concept of electrification is a broad one, and ultimately, many believe the industry will turn to fuel cells, which combine hydrogen and oxygen to produce water vapor and electric current - which can be used to power motors like those turning the wheels of an EV.
But nearer term, General Motors is heavily touting its "extended-range electric vehicle," which some prefer to call a plug-in hybrid.
The Chevrolet Volt, which made its auto show debut in production form in Los Angeles, will have a limited amount of lithium batteries onboard, enough to give it about 40 miles range and has a small internal combustion engine which fires up for longer drives.
GM says the aim is to sell the Volt for less than 30,000 dollars, with other Chevy sedans averaging at around 12,500 to 25,500 dollars.
In one form or another though, most industry leaders feel that electric power is the automobile's future.
BMW AG debuted the Mini E, a battery version of the popular microcar in Los Angeles. CEO Nobert Reithofer said he expected to put about 500 Mini Es into customer hands in Los Angeles and New York by the end of the year. It will lease for some 850 dollars a month, some 500 dollars more than a Mini Cooper S.
At the Paris Motor Show last month, Daimler AG announced plans for a pilot electric vehicle program using its small Smart car division.
And the small, Silicon Valley start-up Tesla Motors has recently begun production of its new, two-seat Roadster, a battery-powered sports car that claims more than 200 mile range and the performance of a Porsche 911 - but also demands an even higher price than the German import at around 109,000 dollars.
How much of a market there might be for electric vehicles is hard to determine. For his part, the Nissan CEO said he believes battery cars could account for as much as 10 percent of global motor vehicle demand - or seven million autos annually - by 2020. But while he said that is a reasonably cautious forecast, Ghosn admitted "nobody knows."
"That presupposes that the lithium-ion battery or some other chemistry becomes truly competitive," cautioned auto analyst Joe Phillippi, of AutoTrends Consulting.
There is little doubt that it is a challenge scaling the technology up from cell phones to automobiles, but there are plenty of people trying.
Earlier this year, Chrysler Corp. unveiled three electric vehicle prototypes and announced it had formed a battery development joint venture with General Electric.
Meanwhile, during the LA Auto Show's press preview Korean carmaker Hyundai showed off a potentially promising variant of lithium-ion chemistry, called lithium polymer, which could prove more powerful and flexible.
Other battery technologies are under development, and work continues on older, less powerful forms of energy storage, including nickel-metal hydride.
