Electric cars no longer an option for eager Californians

Zipping to work in an electric car may seem attractive with soaring gas prices in California--but unfortunately it is not an option for many:

Pretty nifty cars, if you want to get out from under the thumb of the oil companies. There's only one problem: For the most part, you can't have them.

GM and other manufacturers have recalled most of their cars, leaving some in public agency fleets and others in museums or universities. In fact, GM has been hauling its EV1s out to the Arizona desert and crushing them.

For all intents and purposes, the hugely expensive electric car program - - created in the 1990s by the California Air Resources Board's mandate that the major automakers build a certain number of pollution-free cars -- is just about dead. The law requiring manufacturers to offer those cars for sale has long since been modified -- hybrids, compressed natural gas and "SULEV" cars (super ultra-low-emission vehicles) have taken up the environmental slack.

The automakers, saying all-electric vehicles occupy a tiny and economically worthless niche, simply stopped making, leasing or selling the cars.

And the people who leased the cars and wound up adoring them, only to see them called back in at the end of the lease period, are livid. Many wanted to buy the autos, but all but one manufacturer said no.