Friday's opening of the international Los Angeles Auto Show will feature the usual leggy models draped across carnauba-waxed chassis. It will showcase the usual engine housings, gleaming under spotlights, and futuristic dashboards twinkling like front-yard Christmas displays.

But if this show is any indication, the world's automakers are signaling that they know business as usual won't cut it in a market beset by rising oil prices and consumer concern about emissions' role in global warming – and that the hunt is on for the next-generation fuel.

More than any time since the early '70s, automakers are thinking and designing "green," say many industry analysts. The trend is not moving as fast as environmental activists or most climate scientists would like – as protests here make clear – but it also may not be as slow as some critics claim.

Electric vehicles, gasoline-electric hybrids, diesels, and flex-fuel and hydrogen-powered cars are inching up the consumer on-ramp at a faster pace, judging from world debuts of 21 alternative-fuel vehicles.

"It sort of feels like the early part of the 20th century, when everyone was trying to figure out whether to go with steam or electricity or gasoline," says Gavin Conway, editor in chief of Automobile Magazine. "People are saying, 'Do we go with electric, hybrids, diesel, or what?' "

General Motors Corp., for its part, is stirring several alternative-fuel pots. The world's largest automaker will make a plug-in hybrid sport-utility vehicle (which can run on gasoline or on stored electricity obtained by plugging into a standard electrical outlet) that will be double the fuel efficiency of any existing SUV, CEO Rick Wagoner told reporters Wednesday during the show's media preview. The company also plans to expand hybrid models to include Saturn and Chevrolet Malibu sedans in 2007, he said, and will offer Hummers with an engine fueled by biofuels by 2009.

"It's highly unlikely that oil alone is going to supply all of the world's rapidly growing automotive energy requirements," said Mr. Wagoner. "For the global auto industry, this means that we must – as a business necessity – develop alternative sources of propulsion based on alternative sources of energy."

In the US, where gasoline prices remain lower than in Europe, consumer consciousness nonetheless seems to have turned a corner, say Wagoner and others. Recent events figure into interest in other fuels: the partial loss of US oil production after hurricane Katrina, rising public awareness during the Iraq war of the perils of foreign-oil dependence, and soaring energy demands of China and India, which are driving up world oil prices. Perhaps trumping them all is consumers' increased public concern about global warming.

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