COPYRIGHT 2009 Crain Communications, Inc.

Byline: MARK VAUGHN

- It's almost a clichE to say that Southern Califor-nia is the birthplace of automotive trends, yet you could cite examples all day: hot-rodding, kustom kars, T Bucket Roadsters, lowriders, custom vans, drag Beetles, import drags, the import scene, rat rodsthe list goes on and on.

While you'll get plenty of arguments about where each of those trends actually startedlowriders in New Mexico, hot-rodders in the Bay Area or Jersey and so onit would be hard to argue that Southern California wasn't the epicenter of them all, propagating waves of style and creativity that rippled across the country.

But if you looked around now, what would you see besides the remnants of those earlier trends? If you looked hard, you'd find the beginning of an electric-car industry. It's certainly not Detroit-sized; there are no factories yet cranking out EVs and spitting them onto trains and trucks for sale around the world. What you'd find is a sort of incu-bator of a coming industry.

There are research houses staffed by PhDs, small shops converting hybrids into plug-in hybrids and working garages winding electric motors. There's the Fisker Karma hybrid in Orange County, the Aptera in Carlsbad, Plug-In Conversions in San Diego, Miles Electric in Santa Monica, Phoenix Motorcars in Ontario, AC Propulsion in San Dimas, AeroVironment and Energy CS in Monrovia, Tesla in Hawthorne. All are working at one end or the other of the future of transportation.

We don't know which of these will turn into significant players or whether they'll all be overwhelmed by Nissans and Toyotas running on batteries, but we thought we should go out and take some pictures of a few of these guys now, snapshots in time. It would be like seeing Henry Ford at the Edison Illuminating Co. building his Quadricycle or Gottlieb Daimler and Wilhelm Maybach installing their Standuhr engine in a carriage and making a car. Wouldn't it have been neat to have been there then?

But we're here now, and these are the people right here among us who just might be working on the future. We visited four shops that couldwho knows? really lead to something big.

Hi Performance Green Cars

This small shop in industrial Ontario started in 1962, when Howard Seymour would rewind the fried electric motor from your washing machine for eight dollars. Now his sons Brian and Darren, along with friend Bill Ritchie and Brian's wife, Toni, run the shop and they are expanding well beyond washing-machine motors. They do the motors for several electric cars, some you've heard of and some you haven't, but all with little fanfare. When we visited, they were installing AC electric drivetrains into the first of 200 Chinese-made two-seaters that will be sold here under the name Wheego Whip. The cars come four to a container, engineless, and the crew at Hi Performance goes to work, replacing a few interior items before installing the battery packs, motors and controllers. "It's not all about money, said Brian Seymour. "It's the direction we're going.

They built their own AC electric-conversion kit for Toni Seymour's Jetta (license plate "VLTWGON), and the car now tops out at 90 mph with zero emissions. They plan to sell kits to the public starting in May.

Plans include an offering of stock to expand beyond the dusty confines just south of the Ontario airport and build Whips, VLTWGONs and who knows what else.